Kooky in the Kootenays

Photo by Jim Lawrence www.kootenayreflections.com

As I approached the spot where the protest was to be held, hundreds were already milling around looking expectant and the local police - all three of them - were out in force.

"We'd better park the car around the back so when the fighting begins it doesn't get damaged," I said, turning to Gillian, our second guide.

She looked at me strangely. "Nobody's going to fight. Nobody's going to trash the car," she said laughing. "This is Canada."

A protest without the possibility of a scrap? I thought. How reasonable. How boring. How insipid.

As a foreign correspondent with a British broadsheet until I hung up my notepad four years ago, I had spent half my professional life covering protest and conflict.

There was the storming of the parliament in Belgrade when half a million angry protestors gathered to overthrow the Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic.

As I stood there that day, tears streaming down my face from the waves of CS gas and fighting the urge to vomit, I remember the euphoria that coursed through my veins as the riot police turned tail and ran.

Then there was the 100,000-strong throng I joined as they stormed through the streets of Tbilisi in 2003 to seize the seat of national power and oust the corrupt old leader, Eduard Shevardnadze, defying government thugs wielding skull-breaking iron clubs. I even kept one of the clubs for a while as a memento.

There were other revolutions too that I followed from the street – in Ukraine, in Albania, in Romania. Sometimes there were bullets, sometimes just clubs and batons. Each time it was only when the authorities were faced with the unstoppable force of people power that they finally gave in.

As Gillian and I emerged into the crowds outside Kaslo's Secondary School last month the scene couldn't have been more different. Instead of flying stones and bottles there was singing, multi-coloured banners and happy clapping.

Two young ladies, angelically adorned, passed by high above my head on stilts with drapes of muslin streaming behind them. Drummers beat a steady beat with their hands. Others tapped tambourines in time.

"No to greed," read the banners. "No to greed," chanted the crowd in a lilting tenor. The total size of the crowd was a little over a thousand.

Nevertheless for the West Kootenays, the small and kooky region of British Columbia that we now call home, it was quite a turn-out.

For a while, as I stood, I tactically considered the layout, as I might have done in downtown Teheran, the journalist in me scanning for escape exits, crush points and agent provocateurs with weapons under their jackets. But I needn't have bothered.

The most menacing characters there that evening were a smattering of federal and provincial MPs, a First Nation chief or two and a few hoary old backwoodsmen who had arrived in rusty pick-ups.

Alongside were hundreds of ordinary Kootenay folk, some washed, some not, some in ordinary summer wear and others resplendent in organic sandals and eclectic biodegradable dress.

They chanted and they sang. A lady from one of the First Nations spoke emotively about the sanctity of the wilderness. Another decried the greed of the politicians.
The speeches were passionate but hardly rabble-rousing. People hugged each other. Not even a whiff of violence.

The issue at stake was certainly important as local matters go.

A private power company had hatched a plan to dam two much-prized and boisterous mountain rivers in our backyard, some of the most pristine wilderness left in southern British Columbia.

Cables would be run through virgin valleys, the wildlife would suffer, the wilderness would retreat a little further, and a distant investor would make a small return. In exchange they promised a few local jobs.

The entire process was skewed from the start.

In an attempt to ram this and other such projects through, the right-of-centre provincial government had annulled legislation requiring the support of local MPs and hearings such as this one I was attending had been downgraded and were now merely "advisory."

Government officials, seemingly working in cahoots with the power company, had called the meeting I was now at to allow the locals to have their say. But the presiding bureaucrat, squirming a little on his plastic chair, admitted that the numbers and nature of the protest would have no effect on the outcome.

So much for Canadian democracy.

For a while I stood and watched the proceedings, detached, cynical and a little bored. Over the years I had watched rulers use countless tricks to hoodwink their hapless subjects.

As the protestors clapped and sang, I stood, arms crossed and silent.

But then, slowly, as the evening wore on and one indignant local followed another to the microphone to protest, I felt something inside me begin to soften.

Perhaps it was the gentle reasonableness of the protestors. Or their naïve hopes. Or the ham-fistedness with which they expressed their ardour, like an unskilled but eager-to-please lover trying to impress an older and more experienced mate.

Or perhaps it was the hopelessness of the cause, the way that the politicos had snidely skewed the outcome before the process had even begun, or the fact that so many people had travelled so far in a fruitless attempt to have their voices count for something.

I'm still not sure what it was that I found so overwhelmingly endearing about the gathering. But even as I chided myself for being such a naïf, I felt a lump come into my throat and anger well up inside me.

The people were trying to have their say. The rulers were having none of it. Exposing such injustice was exactly what had motivated me in my years as a journalist.

And as I stood there surrounded by my mountain neighbours, the smell of unwashed feet gently wafting up from a set of unusually hairy toes beside me, I felt a warmth towards my fellow souls in the Kootenays - this wonderful collection of hippies, homesteaders and non-conformists who inhabit a dozen small communities nestled in the foothills of BC's Selkirk and the Purcell ranges.

They might not be sophisticated or particularly lucid but they were so colourful, so earthy, so human, so honest and, ultimately, so loveable, especially compared to the cardboard cut-out officials and company representatives arrayed on the other side of the table in their drab grey suits with their carefully-manicured doublespeak.

***

A few days later we threw a party down by the river. We invited our friends and neighbours and they turned up in numbers.

Sunny - neighbour, friend, carpenter, crooner and model of simple, wholesome living – was, as ever, responsible for the music.

I watched him as he lovingly took his most precious possession, a $5,000 hand-made Marten acoustic guitar, from his $400 rust bucket of a car and somehow I found the financial differential between the two, which said so much about his priorities in life, immensely pleasing.

Gillian came too with an unusual entourage that included her new boyfriend - a young man making headway in the local tree-planting community - and two children that she had borrowed for the evening.

Michael, the local bear biologist, appeared in a ragged old cowboy hat.

Forest and Jen, fellow residents of the upper valley who homestead on a beautiful plot of land in the forest, arrived with their four children, the younger ones traipsing after their mum like ducklings after a mother duck.

As the conversation ebbed and swirled, the river flowed past blue and powerful, the campfire burned, all flickering oranges and yellows, and the guests ate huge sticks of Russian-style shashlyk. There was cider, beer and a few bottles of vodka.

Fortified, I even brought out my guitar and tried out some of the tunes Sunny had taught me during the long winter evenings. I don't think anybody clapped, but they didn't hiss or whistle either.

***

That weekend we ran the river in our whitewater raft for the first time this year.

This first descent is always something of an event and I picked four of the hardiest men I knew – Sunny, Steve, Forest and Michael – and brought a chainsaw and coils of rope to try and keep us all out of trouble.

Despite some wicked waves in the rapids we made it down unscathed.

Then we ran it a second time, just for fun.

This time Sunny and Michael, not content with the adrenalin rush that the first run had provided, took out a beautiful virgin cedar canoe that Sunny had lovingly hand-built.

It was a madcap idea and I told them so.

Against all the odds they made it through the rapids upright but were unhorsed by a freak wave and plunged into the icy torrent, heads struggling to stay above the surface.

It took a rescue with emergency throw ropes to save the two as they were swept down the swollen river. The casualty list included some badly strained muscles, acres of bruising and scraped skin and a canoe smashed beyond repair on its maiden voyage.

As I watched Sunny struggling to catch his breath, I felt a wave of affection for this crazy man who was willing to risk his live on a whim. And I realised, not a little shamefully, that my earlier judgment had been far too harsh.

Were my new friends and neighbours reasonable? Perhaps. They certainly eschewed conflict and physical violence. But boring? Hardly. Insipid? Not a bit of it.

Slow to flare and fiercely proud, they could be some of the craziest and most daring people I have met. Mad as a Montenegrin. Rash as a Russian.

And as I reflected on the hardy men and women that have made these hardscrabble mountains their home, I realised that that the grey suits in charge in Victoria are extremely lucky that they are apolitical as they are.

If they chose to direct their fervour into politics and rebellion, it would have taken more than a few weasel words from the emissaries of the men in power to keep the lid on their anger.

British Columbia's grisly secret

(Photo by Gillian Sanders)

Bear season is in full flow here in our quiet little valley, the river is at high water and the sun is beating down for the fifteen or sixteenth day straight.

Thanks in no small regard to Mark Franchetti's write-up in the Sunday Times last weekend we are all but fully booked for this season, with just a couple of odd spots left in the summer and early September.

It almost seems that, now in our fourth season here at the ranch, we have overcome our turbulent early years and settled into a steady rhythm, determined by the seasons, the weather and the wild animals.

Of course, life is never a fairytale. With the hot weather comes an increased threat of wildfires. Officials are predicting an inferno of a year and even now, in what we consider to be spring, there are already two major fires raging out of control in the province.

And then, as ever, there are the bear hunters. All camouflage, huge pick-ups, quad-bikes and cans of Budweiser, they have been out in force scouring the land for suitable targets.

It seems odd in this day and age, in a province that prides itself on it's forward-looking, inclusive ethos, that this 19th Century pursuit is still not only legal, but actively encouraged by the lawmakers.

Of course that is not the image that BC wants to be seen abroad. What with the Winter Olympics approaching at the end of the year, the smiling dignitaries would prefer this dirty little secret is kept well hidden from the outside world.

Of the guests that arrive at our ranch, only a tiny minority are aware that it is still legal to shoot grizzly bears as trophies in the province that styles itself "The Best Place on Earth."

For the grizzlies, the hunt, which is now opposed by almost 80 percent of BC residents and only still championed by a coterie of good ol' boys who somehow have the ear of the provincial premier, is a matter of survival.

For us it is merely one of gross inconvenience. Each May and June as we head out on some of the province's remotest dirt roads leaving civilisation hours behind we come across motorized encampments of bear hunters.

When they leave they abandon the detritus of their sorry sojourns in the bush: beer cans, food cans, spent shells and piles of gore that constitute the parts of the animals they don't want to take home.

The more fastidious hide their gut piles away from the road, but some leave it at campgrounds where it attracts predators and creates fresh conflict between man and the wild animals.

It is as if, unhappy in their own skin, they feel the visceral need to bring down an animal with a high-powered rifle to bolster their own sagging sense of worth.

It is difficult to argue with hunters who are out for food - with those who would put half a deer in the freezer. Those of us who eat meat, and I am one of them, would be hypocrites to decry all forms of animal slaughter.

Even if I don't hunt myself I recognize the legitimacy of cleanly taking down an animal that is plentiful and serving it up to feed the family.

Nor would I argue with killing in self-defence.

If you have done your best to keep your yard clean of attractants, strung an electric fence around your chickens and your fruit trees and a bear still wants to go 12 rounds with you on your own porch, you may have no other choice than to reach for a rifle.

But killing bears for pleasure? In an age when we no longer dock our dogs' tails, or use sharp spurs to bloody our horses' flanks, it seems anachronistic to allow men to shoot an animal whose very existence is under threat just for kicks.

It harks back to a day of wife-beating and Indian-shooting when only white males had rights and their aim was to establish dominance over all other living beings.

Ironies abound when it comes to the trophy hunters with whom I have crossed paths. One is that a good number of them are terrified of the animals they seek to destroy.

While we – soft-headed hippies to them - head up a trail with little more than a can of pepper spray and in the summer frequently carry nothing at all, it is unusual to see such men abroad without a large-caliber gun, even when not hunting.

As they sit around the camp-fire chugging beers, they favourite fare is exaggerated stories of close calls with the monsters of nature.

The year before last I heard tell of a 900 lb male grizzly that had been charging cars in our valley. In fact it was a peaceful and elegant lady bear of no more than 350 lbs. Wild? Definitely. Dangerous to motorists? Hardly.

Then there is the notion that the bear hunters are only doing what their grandfathers did.

Nursed in the romance of the days of the pioneers, they seek to relive the heroic scenarios of yesteryear, but with quad-bikes, GPS locators and telescopic sights.

Needless to say where the quadding trails end and the hiking trails begin, the mark of the hunters' boots usually begins to peter out too.

Their grandfathers may have earned their spurs bushwhacking miles through virgin forests but these men seem to be slaves to their throttle-gunning thumbs and when the engine stops, so do they.

Despise them? Certainly. In half an adult lifetime spent in war zones I have met enough men with guns in their hands who were intent on killing.

But for each armed soldier, guerrilla or paramilitary there was another man in a different uniform or of a different creed keen to reciprocate the favour.

Perhaps not an existence I would have chosen for myself, but certainly one in which risk abounded and death could come to any man.

For today's bear hunters there is no such risk. Less than three people are killed in an average year in north America by bears and the majority of them are joggers, hikers and other innocents who just get unlucky.

When the pioneers headed into the bush in hob-nailed boots with poorly-made guns and pitted themselves against the fiercer grizzlies of yesteryear there was always the possibility they would not return.

But today that calculus of risk no longer holds. Today it is always the bear, and most often just its pelt, that is brought out by these hollering, whooping modern-day heroes.

Is there anything we can do about all this? Not much. But we should certainly try.

Since the beginning of this year we have been asking former and current guests who feel the same way that we do, to take a few moments and pen a short note to the one man who can change all this, the recently re-elected premier of British Columbia, Gordon Campbell. His email address is Gordon.Campbell.mla@leg.bc.ca

His Environment Minister, by the way, is Barry Penner at env.minister@gov.bc.ca and he may be interested to read a copy of your letter. Canada being a democratic country, I have it on good authority that every email sent to these inboxes is read. The point will slowly filter through.

The day when trophy hunters brought more money into the province than wildlife-spotting tourists is long gone and the hunt no longer makes ethical, economic or environmental sense.

But the hunters are still more organised in their lobbying effort than we are and we need to remind the government of how we feel. Up to 300 grizzlies a year are shot by trophy hunters in BC.

If you choose to write, it's better if you use your own words, that way it has more impact, but things you could mention are the number of dollars you brought to BC and your feelings when you found that grizzly hunting was legal.

If you want to hit home you can also mention the upcoming winter Olympics and the negative effect that grizzly hunting will have on BC's image.

I don't want this missive to be all negative. The sun is shining and it is a beautiful spring. Yesterday while out bear-spotting we came across a gorgeous black bear mum with two small cubs.

When they saw us the cubs shinned up a tree, as quick as a ferret down a hole. We stood and watched for several minutes, keeping a respectful distance.

And then, to reward us for our patience, the two little cubs came sloping back down the tree, paw over paw, to join up with mum. Gillian, our excellent naturalist and bear-viewing guide, took the photo above as the cub came down.

As a reporter I always found the best way to screw myself up to take a risk that filled me with fear was to shame myself into comparing my lot to that of the victims of the conflict: the dispossessed, the refugees, the families of the slain, the tortured prisoner.

When I moved to BC I thought that stage of my life was over. That I would leave campaigning to a younger, fresher generation.

But it seems that even here in the peaceful vibrant and idyllic corner of Canada, some men, like insecure children who batter smaller boys in the playground to prove their toughness, are not content to just sit back and enjoy their happy lot.

They need to kill to feel alive. They want the pelt of the grizzly bear, that great icon of the Canadian wilderness, to stick on their wall or adorn their sofa as a token of their virility.

I think such behaviour is reprehensible and it shames me that my adopted province, of which I am otherwise quietly proud, should keep it legal. Surely it's time that was changed.

Grizzly Bear Ranch in the Sunday Times

(© M. Watson / ardea.com)

Mark Franchetti of the Sunday Times came to the ranch earlier this month. More used to covering wars, conflicts and violent parts of Russia, this was his first travel piece. Here is the review he wrote.


Mark Franchetti

Deep in the remote wilderness of British Columbia, I was in the back of a 4WD as it negotiated its way along a mountain dirt road.

A spectacular view opened up in the abyss below, across an emerald-green lake ringed by infinite thick forests. Mesmerised by the unspoilt beauty, I was almost day-dreaming when the car came to an abrupt halt. “Bear!! Bear to the right!!” cried out Julius Strauss, my guide.

I have seen bears before, but either caged or as tasteless decoration before a fireplace. This was entirely different — my first live bear in the wilderness.

The animal, a hungry midsized black bear recently out of hibernation, was nibbling grass by the side of the road, its back turned to us. Slowly we edged closer, killed the engine and stepped out of the car to get a better look. The bear turned and spotted us. We froze. It froze.

“In the unlikely event that a wild bear charges you, stand still. Do not move. Whatever you do, don’t run away!” Those were the strict instructions Julius had given me. Easier said than done.

Briefly, I wondered if I was about to go down in the annals of bear-viewing as a chicken-hearted coward who tried — and failed — to outrun an enraged black bear.

But as I learnt in my four days with Julius, not only are bears intelligent, they are also shy and generally good-natured. They need a good reason to attack, let alone eat you — more later on what to do in this case, other than panic, obviously.

Some 30yd apart, we and the bear by the roadside stared at each other for a few minutes. It sniffed the air to make us out, took two final mouthfuls of grass and then yawned — a mild stress sign, whispered Julius. Then, with a few agile steps, it was gone, vanishing in the thick forest. It was truly a lovely moment.

If you are inclined towards experiencing pristine wilderness, you will be hard-pressed to beat a few days at the Grizzly Bear Ranch in British Columbia’s Selkirk Mountains. Or if, like me, you are an urban beast whose love affair with the wild is limited to watching David Attenborough, then you should try it, for it is quite an eye-opener.

The ranch is owned and run by Julius, a British former war correspondent, and his Estonian wife, Kristin, also a former journalist. Before I go on, let me come clean: they are friends of mine. I promise, nonetheless, to remain unbiased.

Three years ago, Julius and Kristin — both self-confessed “townies” — turned their back on a life of urban comfort, financial security and high-flying jobs to move to British Columbia.

If you’re thinking of one of those television programmes — say, about a family from Milton Keynes packing up and moving to sunny Spain to open up a restaurant — well, think again. This is the real thing, because the spot they chose is stunning, but it’s also very, very remote.

The ranch — several wood cabins — sits on the banks of a fast-flowing mountain river at the top of an enchanting valley covered in thick forests of firs, cedars and hemlocks that stretch as far as the eye can see.

Towering above are snow-covered ridges and peaks that reach 9,000ft. The closest hamlet — population a few hundred — is an hour’s drive away. The nearest proper big supermarket is two hours. The area is off-grid: there are no phone lines and no mobile coverage.

In winter, when the two-lane dirt track to the ranch can turn treacherous, there is up to 4ft of snow and temperatures drop to -20C. Skip snowploughing for a few days and you risk being stuck until spring.

For all its beauty — and, trust me, this is untouched wilderness at its best — I would end up insane and divorced in less than a week were I to move to such isolation. That, of course, is why the bears like it so much. They are not into people. Both black bears and grizzlies — whose numbers are dwindling — populate the forests around the ranch, alongside moose, deer, wolves and coyotes.

Between late May and late October, Julius and Kristin take in six guests at a time for three days and three nights. They stay by the aquamarine river in simple but comfortable wood cabins, which are supplied with fresh linen and fitted with a wood-burning stove, a hot shower, composting lavatory and electricity — supplied by the ranch’s independent power system. They have also installed satellite internet, so if you really don’t want to get away from it all, you can always e-mail and Skype.

Kristin, whose formidable cooking talents make her as special as the bear-viewing, serves guests a hearty breakfast, a very generous packed lunch and a two-course dinner — or a barbeque feast. All food, which is nearly all organic, is freshly cooked and every meal is different. Breakfast and dinner are served at a communal table in the hosts’ cabin.

The place is so remote that you can walk for hours without coming across a single person. “We keep the number of guests down to keep the experience more personal and to disrupt the bears as little as possible,” said Julius. “Our bears are not usually habituated to humans. Some may never have seen a person before. It’s not bears on tap, it’s not a safari park, but we have never had a guest during bear season who has left without seeing one.”

Julius has seen up to 10 bears a day.

In my four days at the ranch, at the very beginning of this year’s season in early May, I came across six. We climbed up old logging and mining tracks on foot along steep gorges and clear mountain streams. Julius looks for bear prints and scat, which he attentively examines like some rare delicacy. What did the bear eat and when did it relieve itself?

I very much got into the spirit of things and by the end of my stay found myself becoming excessively excited at the sight of fresh bear scat — too much pure air, clearly. Another guest was soon taking bear-scat snapshots. To my bitter disappointment, on day four, when I thought I knew enough to put Julius out of business, I found myself carefully poking a stick into some mud I had mistaken for poo and lovingly studying it.

The bears proved shrewder, for while I was trudging heavily in the snow, looking for them high up, they were lazily feeding by the roadside, which is where all my six chance encounters took place.

Late May to the end of June is when you are most likely to see black bears. Grizzly-viewing season runs from mid-September to the end of October, when bears weighing up to 800lb and measuring up to 8ft — standing — descend to the ­valley to catch fish as they spawn in the river that runs past the ranch.

If that sounds worrying, don’t be alarmed. You are far more likely to get run over by a car than mauled by a bear. Every year in Canada and America only two or three people are killed by bears. While minor attacks are more frequent, in most cases an unprovoked wild bear will not attack a person if you stick to a few basic rules.

Bears are very fast runners, reaching speeds of up to 35mph. So if you come across one face to face, do not run — unless you are in tights and matching vest, on an athletics track and your name is Usain Bolt. Running away from a bear provokes its hunting instinct. It is sure to run after you and almost certainly spoil your holiday. They can also swim rapids and are great tree climbers.

Talk to the bear. Try “Yo, bear”, “Good bear”, “Nice bear”. Seriously, that’s what the experts teach you. And walk away slowly. If, however, you are exceptionally unlucky and the bear charges you, then you are taught to distinguish between a bluff charge and a predatory assault.

The first and most common of the two could give you a heart attack, but will come to an abrupt end without ever reaching you. Here, too, you must not run. Yeah, right. I know. But as part of his ABC of bear-viewing, Julius shows a safety video with footage of people doing just that, and they are all Canadians, so it must be possible.

If, however, the charging bear is determined to have you for lunch and does not stop, then you should first fall to the ground and pretend to be dead — so advise the experts, who also say that if it continues to attack you, then you can always grab a stick and try to fight it off.

No, the video does not show anyone pulling this off, so good luck. Remember, such attacks are exceptionally rare. Julius has never been charged by one, but for safety he always carries a can of bear spray — a powerful form of pepper spray.

He and Kristin disclose the exact location of the ranch only to guests who have prepaid part of their holiday, to avoid attracting bear hunters from other regions. Shockingly, hunting of both black and grizzly bears is still legal in British Columbia.

This, even though most of its residents are in favour of a ban, at least to protect grizzlies — some 400 of which were killed in British ­Columbia last year. Commercial bear-viewing also now generates more revenue than bear-hunting, which Julius is lobbying the local authorities to ban.

So forgive the less than detailed map. But believe me, the Grizzly Bear Ranch is not a Nigerian money scam. It’s real, as are the bears. I’ve been there and saw them. And I loved it.

Mark Franchetti travelled as a guest of British Airways and the Grizzly Bear Ranch

Grizzly Bear Ranch, the Book

It's been a long while coming, probably a decade or more since I first thought about the idea, and its still a long way from fruition.

For many years I put off the idea, explaining to myself glibly that I had nothing serious to say. Nothing that had not already been said.

But, deep inside, I knew I was being insincere, just as I once told everyone I didn’t want to be a journalist, for fear that I might try and fail.

When I finally admitted to myself that I wanted to write a book I hopscotched around various ideas.

At first it was to be about the war in Kosovo, based on my experiences there as a reporter. Then a more ambitious plan that framed all the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.

Then a collection of vignettes from trouble spots around the world.

I was once approached to write on Putin's Russia by a publisher in London, but after a couple of meetings the idea seems to fizzle.

I met one or two literary agents, but since I didn’t really know what I wanted to do they couldn't help me.

Finally I was introduced by an old friend, an excellent journalist who threw in his career with a British broadsheet to become a successful best-selling writer (check out www.patrickbishop.net), to Annabel, an agent in London.

We met in January and since then I have been plugging away at a book proposal that I hope will impress her.

It's not been easy. I may be adept at knocking out 800 word news stories, but writing tens of thousands of words, with varied delivery, differing settings and a whole slew of different moods has been tough.

Even worse, since the book is framed as my transition from hard-bitten foreign reporter to wilderness bear nerd I have had to write about myself in a very personal way, a tall order.

Many times the entire project has been out on hold amid growing distractions.

In the last few months we have been madly busy tearing down one building, putting up another, painting, cutting grass and preparing in a thousand different ways for the new season which, incidentally, starts today.

We have also had our annual training to complete – this year Kristin and I recertified in wilderness first aid, an important skill if you live at the back of beyond, three hours from the nearest hospital.

Finally, this last weekend, after countless rewrites, I sent it off. I am keeping my fingers crossed that Annabel sees enough promise in the proposal to take me on.

Even if that happens I expect to be asked to make a lot more changes before it is presentable enough to be touted around the publishers. And then, of course, somebody has to buy the idea.

In the meantime, however, especially for the loyal followers of our wilderness adventure, here is an early extract.

It details a time before we came to the ranch: my first meeting Kristin's parents. Quite a culture clash. If nothing else I hope it will raise a smile.


Chapter 7. Good-Bye to the Old World (Excerpt)

In Estonia I met Kristin's parents. It was a long-awaited occasion. Kristin and I had met nearly a year before and I knew that they were initially far from pleased with my arrival in their lives. In a fit of pique, Kristin's mother had dramatically set fire to the clothes she had left at home, a symbolic, though thankfully temporary, burning of bridges. Perhaps it was understandable. One minute Kristin, who had kept the problems in her relationship with her husband to herself, was ostensibly happily married to one of the nation's rising young diplomatic stars. The next she had run off to another country to be with an obviously flawed foreigner. They were, if anything, even less pleased now that we were off to Canada. It would mean that they would be lucky if they saw their daughter even once a year.
Kristin's father, Tiit, was an earthy and colourful character, a self-made man who had built a decent-sized engineering firm from scratch but still liked nothing better than standing in a muddy ditch with a shovel in his hand.
When we were introduced he stared me in the eye and gave my poor white-collared mitt a bone-crushing squeeze. We exchanged pleasantries in Russian. He was polite but cool. Then he casually announced that he would be expecting me to join him and the rest of the family for their weekly sauna.

***

Fortunately I had a little experience in matters of the sauna. Russians like nothing better than to head for the banya or sauna each weekend and, like many foreigners living in Moscow, I had taken up the habit. The ritual involves boiling yourself in a room heated to 100 degrees Celsius or more until your skin begins to burn, breathing becomes laborious and you turn the colour of cooked lobster.
When you can bear it no more, you run outside and fling yourself into snow or freezing water. The procedure, which is repeated up to four times and interspersed with beers, snacks and pickles, is accompanied by bouts of panting, swearing, heavy breathing, hollering and sighing. During quieter moments you beat each other with birch branches.
By the time I met Kristin's family I was hardly a sauna novice. I had sat naked with Russian Spetsnaz officers in a banya in Chechnya, knocking back shot glasses of vodka while a drunk KGB officer toasted the Queen. I had even taken a dive into the snow during a Siberian winter when the outside air temperature was 50 degrees below. I can't say I enjoyed the experience, especially as I had mistakenly rolled in my own urine, but I survived.
The Estonians were, I reckoned, a cooler-headed crew than the clinically-mad Russians and I doubted whether their rituals could be more tortuous than that of their Slavic counterparts.

***

So it was with growing alarm that I sat, fully unrobed, in the family sauna that weekend and watched as the temperature dial passed through 110 degrees Celsius and continued to climb.
I realized I was in serious trouble when I noticed that Tiit was seated stark naked, without a towel or protection for his tender spots, on the searing wooden bench.
"You like it?" he asked me with a sadistic grin.
"I love it."
"Hot?"
"No," I said, feigning surprise. "Just comfortable."
We took breaks for beer every so often and then we chatted. Tiit spoke Russian with a monstrous accent and frequently threw in Finnish and Estonian words. The vocabulary was heavily industrial, not a genre I was strong on. I spoke Muscovite Russian with bits of street slang that I had picked up. Barring the odd curse, we barely understood a word the other said. And no sooner had the verbal sparring begun in earnest, than it was back in to the sauna for more. More heat. More suffering. More defiance.
At last, after three hours of this brutal ritual - the younger members of the family had long since wilted and fled and only pater familias and I were still in the running – Tiit finally appeared to have had his fill.
"Done?" he asked.
"Done."
As we both exited the sauna for the last time, he grabbed the showerhead and took a quick frigid rinse. Then picking up the soap and a stiff brush he handed them both over and, turning his large bare bottom towards me, said: "Ok. Now you can scrub my back."
I knew a sign of acceptance when I saw one.

Town & Country

My Russian has never been particularly scholarly or grammatical, but with a Slavic shrug here, a sibilant grunt there and a well-chosen bitten-off expletive tossed into the mix I have usually managed to get by in the former Soviet Union.

Once during my incarnation as an itinerant journalist I shaved my locks down to nol pyaty, the standard coiffeur for a Russian conscript, and, dressed in a Red Army uniform, impersonated my way onto a military helicopter and into the then war-torn republic of Chechnya.

This last week, however, the scope of my knowledge of the language of the proletariat was tested to its limits and found wanting as Kristin's Dad, Tiit, made his first visit to the ranch since we moved out here more than three years ago.

A man of action with little time for the finer things in life, he had barely rubbed the jetlag from his eyes when he dived into an elephantine task that I have been putting off for some time: insulating the crawl space that separates the floor of our house from the ground.

The previous owners of the ranch had never bothered much with such niceties such as insulation and during the long cold winter evenings our feet lose all feeling and turn blue after prolonged contact with the kitchen floor.

Furthermore - eco-friendly citizens that we claim to be - there really is no excuse for pouring away thousands of log-hours every winter just to warm the gravelly and indifferent British Columbian sod.

By any measure the task at hand was a nasty and as Tiit disappeared muttering under the house I donned headlamp, kneepads, overalls and a clutch of tools and followed him into the bowels of the building.

As each of us lay on our backs in the wet dirt, surrounded by the putrefying remains of long-dead mice and other small vertebrates, we contemplated the job ahead: stapling 1,200 square feet of reflective film to the underside of the wooden beams.

The surface area was huge, the gap between the earth and the floor little more than two feet, and the work fiddly, claustrophobic, tiring and bitingly painful for the stomach muscles.

As soon as we were in position, Tiit, a man who runs his own large engineering company in his native Estonia and is used to being obeyed, began to shout out long and complex orders in high-speed Russian.

His vocabulary was heavily industrial, included a tumble of Estonian and Finnish words and was delivered with an execrable Nordic accent that left me almost no chance at comprehension.

As I lay in the dirt, nose crammed against a dank water pipe, rock chewing at my back, I tried to pick out the words. Molotok was one I recognized but couldn't remember what it meant. Pyla another.

Then, just as I struggled to make some sense of the latest delivery he would pump out a fresh interrogative. "Is your copper gas pipe 5mm or 6mm inside diameter?"

These would throw me completely. First of all I would have to convert millimeters to inches, then translate the whole lot into English, work out the answer and put it back into Russian.

By then his train of thought had moved on and he would have launched into a fresh Slavo-Finno-Ugric verbal contortion, part philosophy, part order, part soliloquy.

I felt like I was being subjected to a linguistic version of water-boarding. My brain told me that the ordeal was survivable - that one day I would see the sun again and breathe fresh air - but my mind had difficulty accepting that premise.

Finally, in a fit of pique, I threw down my tools and headed for the escape hatch and the outside world.

Ten minutes later Tiit put a staple through a main power cable.

Even under pedestrian circumstances connecting with 120 volts is, literally, shocking, but Tiit has the added excitement of being surrounded by half an acre of aluminium foil. It lit up like a Christmas Tree.

He came out of the exit hole like a ground squirrel with a weasel on its tail, hair on end, white-faced and giggly with shock. I admit to feeling a little pleased and hoped that we might now abandon the whole sorry venture. But half an hour later we were back down the hole again.

By the time we finally took off our overalls four days later we had fixed a whole list of infrastructural imperfections.

Collectively the tally of mended, improved and installed items included two wood-burning stoves, a wonky door, a new dishwasher, two chimneys, a toilet, a kitchen tap and two new layers of loft insulation.

By the time we headed back for Calgary airport at the end of the week, I felt like the walking dead and even Tiit, giperactivni that he is, was finally beginning to wilt.

The adventure, however, was not quite over. Just a few miles from the airport and check-in the large purple Land Cruiser, our automotive pride and joy and conqueror of the mountain trails, threw a mechanical fit.

First the automatic gearbox stalled. Then it began to shudder and kangaroo hop at low speeds. The only remedy was not to slow down and with every mile that became more and more treacherous.

When we finally reached airport parking – and without the option of slowing down, stopping or reversing - we came screeching into the lot, cannoning over the pedestrian islands like drunken hillbillies.

Once stopped, the car was clearly going nowhere. So Kristin and I decided to make the best out of a bad situation and checked in to a luxurious little B&B we know near the centre of town. (It's called River Wynde and we highly recommend it for any of our guests heading through Calgary this year.)

There was, of course, more consolation to come. We spent the next two days eating Vietnamese, Indian and sushi and drinking fine coffee and draft beer.

As for our poor abandoned Land Cruiser it seems the transmission is broken. We're looking at several thousand dollars to mend it - not a welcome outgoing at a time when the global financial mess is finally hitting the British Columbia tourism market.

So the car has stayed at the mechanic's and is booked in for a long remedial holiday while the specialists put together a diagnosis and order the necessary parts from the US.

Kristin and I, meanwhile, had one grand stroke of luck - Peggy, a friend, gave us a lift all the way from Calgary to our own muddy front door yesterday.

Not a moment too soon. Anticipating a quick turn-around, neither of us had brought more with us on the trip than a change of underwear and a toothbrush.

Kristin, of course, looked immaculate as ever but I was beginning to appear a little ragged around the edges and had noticed the occasional disparaging glance from the slick townies.

Definitely time to head back to the wilderness where folk don't turn their noses up at an unwashed lumberjack shirt and a pair of dirty working trousers.

Wolf at the door

It's still ten below here in the valley most mornings but the days are getting longer, the sun has been out almost continuously, and the wolves are abroad in numbers.

It seems that wherever you turn there is the rumour and sign of their passing.

Olli, our septuagenarian German neighbour who has spent more than 20 years up here in the bush, reports three wolf kills on his 500-acre plot.

Across the river from us there is another kill and Ed and Lynda have seen the coyotes and eagles scavenging what the wolves have left behind just across from their house.

Today, for the second time in a week, I crossed the river to investigate. There are no houses over there and the wild animals run just a little freer than on our lightly homesteaded western bank.

Taking the two dogs – German Shepherds, our own two socialised wolflets – I set off through the three-foot deep snow.

It was fairly warm out and the snow was heavy and cloying. With not a single snowfall in the last three weeks every track stood out firm and strong.

At first I traced my own footsteps – made last weekend on a first foray – but after a few hundred feet I branched off to the right and upwards.

It was heavy going, I had stripped my snowshoes down to their minimum and I sunk ever deeper as I struggled upwards. Every now and then I stopped to catch my breath.

After a few minutes I came across the first wolf tracks. Just one lone little trail. Then another trail joined in. Then another.

Soon I was walking on what can only be described as a wolf highway. I looked for signs of humans but there were none. Once or twice there was a larger tracks – probably elk or moose.

And then we came across the first wolf scat – a fairly compact dog-like turd but packed with hair.

My two charges looked alarmed. Until then they had happily snuffled along in the snow, sniffing at this and that, content in the belief that their omnipotent master was with them.

Now they looked at me – unarmed, red-faced and breathing heavily – and I could see the thought cross even their dull canine minds: will he really be able to see off a pack of wild wolves?

Of course the brave duo had chased townie doggies around Anchorage last winter but now they were up against real lupine hillbillies that feast on live animals and drink the blood of ungulates.

They looked worried. Then we saw another wolf scat, and another. As if to the fall of an invisible conductor's baton, they both arched their backs and pinched off their own rather less fearsome looking product.

I was not sure if it was one of those dog scent-marking moments or perhaps the prospect of a face-to-face meeting with their undomesticated brethren that had loosened their bowels.



Of course, I have always wanted to see a wolf, but so far my efforts have been barren. Since arriving in wolf country it seems that everyone has seen one except me.

Last year while out guiding, the guests in Gillian's car (Gillian is our excellent, second guide) twice saw wolves – once a lone animal and another time a small group of four or five on a magical frosty late autumn morning.

We have even had a guest who took a close-up snapshot of a wolf, not a mile from our house. At first she thought it was a neighbour's dog, it stood so still and calm.

When the photo arrived in our email box one morning – the guest had been leaving when she took the photo - there it was: a magnificent black wolf, with piercing green eyes.

There was one time, driving near the ranch late at night, when I fancied I spied a wolf in the headlights but it may have been a coyote, an animal we see fairly frequently.

With only one recorded human death at the hands of wolves in north America in the last 100 years, I was willing to take the chance of running into a whole pack of them.

The dogs, I suspect, were not, and they stuck to me like barnacles for the next half hour or so as we passed several more hairy turds and pools of blood in the snow.

At the bottom of one incline there were the remains of what looked like an elk. The wolves had done themselves proud.

All that was left of the unfortunate was fur and the herbivorous contents of it's stomach.



Tramping through the snow on a sunny day is only one of many delights we have discovered in our first full winter in the valley.

We did, however, cheat a little over Christmas and visited Europe for six weeks since my last posting.

We travelled to England, Wales, Hungary and Estonia and spent a wonderful time traipsing around cafes and restaurants and catching up with family and friends.

Of course with the trip came jetlag – and an opportunity to catch up on some of the European reading we miss so much here in the New World.

Both Kristin and I read Charlotte Hobson's beautifully-narrated account of a year spent in a provincial Russian town the year that Communism fell.

I also read Arkady Babchenko's brutal account of fighting in Chechnya. But the find of the trip was Patrick Bishop's A Good War.

Patrick was once my foreign editor at the Daily Telegraph. Since then he has gone on to greater things with the publication of three non-fiction books in as many years.

A Good War is his exceptional first novel. It is so much more than just a good war story.

I don't usually plug products in this blog – especially not those written by my friends – it would somehow seem wrong.

But both Kristin and I enjoyed the book so much I have to mention it. So, next time you're looking for something for a winter evening by the fire, that's our recommendation.



When we finally got back to north America the ranch was buried under three feet of iced, crusted snow.

Far too tall an order for our feeble catalogue snow plough, we called on the services of neighbour Ed who ploughed a small path to our front door with his yellow digger.

Once we had the water working and the house heated – which took the best part of 48 hours – the next task was to clear the snow off the roofs of the outbuildings.

During our first two winters we have both times lost structures to the weight of the snow and were determined to avoid the same this year.

For days on end I stood on the roofs and shoveled, no mechanical shortcut available.

For the wolflets – now three years old and no smarter than the day they were born – this was a pleasure almost too much to bear.

For hours at a time they stood below and fought over the flying chunks, growling, barking and snapping at each other as if each icy missile was the juiciest, meatiest morsel.

Staying for the winter

It’s official. A milestone to celebrate. A baptism, if you like, though not of fire, more of ice and snow.

Since arriving in our remote valley nearly three years ago we have, despite our struggles, been viewed by the more fibrous of the mountain men that live around us as something of outsiders, townies even.

Part of the problem is that we drive a purple SUV and not a pick-up. It doesn’t help that we don’t hunt. Neither of us can stand Amiercan Budweiser and we mostly drink organic beer – hippy juice to the redneck.

But the most condemning facet of our existence, one that stands head and shoulders above all our other sins in local eyes, is that each winter we pack up and head out.

Never mind that for the last two years we have headed north not south and spent the cold months not in the Bahamas but in that unlovely northern city, Anchorage. For the diehards that matters not a bit.

Of course this is Canada, not the US, and even that saltiest locals are too polite to say rude things to our faces. But we can see the looks, hear the mumbled comments.

Prissy part-timers, seasonal lightweights, sunny-weather wannabes.

Each time we head into the local village (an hour’s drive on an icy road along a frigid lake) we are greeted with the words: “Heading out again for the winter?” or “Off somewhere nice this year?”

The comments somehow rankle and behind the smiles we often half-suspect a mixture of pity (Ah… They’re not up to it!) or smug condescension (Of course our winters are tough. Aren’t you?).

Well. I’ve got news for the mutterers and old-timers. This year we will not be heading out of the valley. We are – I almost feel a lump in my throat as I say the words – staying for the winter.

So what’s the big deal, you might ask. It’s not exactly the old days when you laid in your provisions in October and didn’t open the cabin door, except to trap marten and mink, until May.

There are no armed prospectors and thieves roaming the hills and the nasty beasties of the forest are all nicely tucked up in their winter dens.

Well, that’s true, but in some ways, it is a big deal. First of all there is the snow.

Of course I’d seen snow before we came to Canada.

I’d struggled across the cold blown plains of Siberia in February past the ruins of Stalin’s gulags and caravanned through the Afghan Hindu Kush in January with gunmen for company.

Some of the places I have been have winter temperatures several tens of degrees lower than the place we now call home.

But nowhere I have seen in a life of wandering, nor even imagined in the most raw and exotic dreams, have more snow than we have here.

We have buckets of the stuff, truckloads, whole mountains of white that creep into every crevice and fill every hole. Sometimes it falls relentlessly for day after day after day.

At times it is light, powdery and playful as a kitten – at other times wet, heavy, stolid. When it melts and then refreezes it turns into immoveable ice formations that require a pick or better to dislodge.

Then, of course, there is the isolation. Highway 31, never a magisterial transport artery, turns into an icy track – a tenuous thread that struggles to keep the valley connected to the world.

Every day or so, it is true, a huge yellow plough – all flashing lights and scraping metal - appears like a pre-historic animal and does battle with the encroaching white stuff.

But as soon as it has passed the snow once again begins to mass, squeezing our lifeline to the south, our supply of fuel and groceries and our physical route out of this arctic hide-away.

When the road is impassable there is of course the satellite. Our internet and telephone connection are both channeled through an 18 inch dish perched on the back of our house.

But during heavy falls that too gathers precipitation and reception slowly fades to nothing. The only option then is a red-blooded trek through waist-high snow to scrape the dish free of its icy crust.

If our systems fail – and they always seem to die during the coldest days of winter, never during the far-off warming days of summer – we fall back on the basics: firewood, candles, warm clothes.

So why, you might ask, go through all this? Why not head out? South? West? East? Anywhere with better infrastructure and a gentler climate?

The answer, I suppose, is simple. The winter, for all the trials that it brings, is just gorgeous: a time of year to be embraced and relished.

It is a time of unearthly quiet, knitted pullovers, long hours by the log fire and beautiful sunny days when the entire valley sparkles as if host to a celestial light.

Today I walked with the dogs down to a bend in the river a few miles to the north of the ranch. (It is the place we take our guests to look for grizzly bear and wolf tracks in the sand in the autumn.)

There was two or three feet of snow on the ground and nobody had been that way since the latest fall. As I snow-shoed down towards the river I saw fresh deer tracks and some small scat, probably from a weasel or some other mustelid.

For a while I stood and just stared at the sparkling water, the snow and the sun on the distant peaks. It seemed incredible to have all this beauty in one place, and with no one else for miles around.

When darkness begins to fall – and dusk is now coming around 4pm as we approach the shortest days of the year – we retreat to sit in front of the fire. Sometime we watch a European art movie that we have been saving up, other times we read.

Every Wednesday evening Sunny, a treasured neighbour who lives a mile or so to the south, comes over. Kristin cooks something and we drink wine and play the guitar. (He’s teaching. I’m learning.)

Olli, who lives a little further down the valley on 500 acres of cleared forest, drops by some dark evenings to tell us his stories of 30 years spent in the Canadian bush with grizzly bears, elk and wolves.

At other times we take up a neighbour’s invitation to party, chuck a chainsaw, some snow chains and a couple of six packs into the back of our Land Cruiser and head south through the blustering snow.

Once a week or so we make the two hour drive into Nelson, the nearest town of any size and home to an eclectic collection of hippies, loggers and left-wing radicals, to take in provisions and meet up with friends.

Not to say they are so wedded to the wilderness that we never leave.

Next week we will be departing on a trawl through Europe – our annual pilgrimage to catch up with old friends and families – that will take in England, Wales, Hungary and Estonia.

We’ll leave the dogs with friends in the village, drain the water, shut off the power and let the snow slowly engulf everything.

But by mid January we’ll be itching to be back again. The rush, the bustle, the rudeness of the big cities makes for a pleasant visit, but a poor place to live a life.

Anyway, friends, guests and colleagues, the wilds are calling. Time to put down my pen and don my hat, gloves and boots – and take up a shovel.

Meanwhile Kristin and I wish you all a very Happy Christmas and a marvellous New Year. And in 2009 we hope to see as many of you as can make it out here at our little wilderness paradise.

Read all about it! Grizzly Bear in the Guardian!

By any measure it’s been a fine year here at Grizzly Bear Ranch.

The bears have been healthy and numerous in our valley (with the exception of a slow week in September), the weather has, for the most part, been glorious and our guests have been plentiful and pleasant.

After putting our hearts into making every holiday at the ranch a winning one, the end of October marks that time of year when the grizzlies head into the high country to sleep, our guests return to their winter habitats and we baton down the hatches against the approaching winter.

November is usually a month of mixed blessings – many of the animals depart, the weather turns cold bringing in driving rain and snow and the road at the end of our driveway turns into an ice rink.

But we also get a chance to pay off our debts, visit our friends in the valley, read cherished books we have carefully squirreled away for just such occasions during the busy summer, and get in the firewood.

November is also the month we make our annual pilgrimage to Vancouver to feast on Chinese food, take in the multi-ethnic sights, sounds and smells, stock up on provisions not available locally and browse the multi-story bookshops.

Inevitably, perhaps, this year it has not all been plain sailing.

After spending thousands repairing and replacing the suspension, steering and brakes on one of our Land Cruisers at a specialist workshop in Vancouver, it spluttered to a stop 10 miles from home.

The alternator had blown. For the second time in two months. As we struggled along in the dark the words that the mechanic who last fixed it used to reassure Kristin came floating back to me: “I’ve rebuilt it… it’s as good as new… will last forever.”

We finally made it home in our second car but the highway that leads to our house (a glorified goat track as those of you who have been to the ranch will know) is now so potholed that it is shaking our remaining Land Cruiser to pieces.

Back at the ranch we threw ourselves at the firewood with vigour. Every couple of years we buy a logging truck of timber - each load must scale in the tens of tons – and it was waiting patiently for our return.

Sporting a fancy mesh face shield, ear protectors, kevlar gloves and steel-capped boots (I’ve learned a thing or two since arriving in the wilderness) and with Kristin keen and willing to help, we set about dismembering the first of several dozen nuclear missile-sized trees.

And then the saw broke. It didn’t explode glamorously in a fiery inferno or fling bits of searing metal around my head but merely putted-putted disappointingly to an early death.

“Your cylinder’s blown,” the local man told when I took the hapless machine in for repair.

“Can we nurse it back to life?” I whined. “At least for another season or two?” The global economic downturn has been weighing heavily on my mind of late.

“A season or two!?” He looked at me as if I was stupid. “It’s not going to start again. Not even once.”

An hour later, and several hundred dollars poorer, I walked out with a new chainsaw and a worried knot in my stomach. We have six months without income ahead and you certainly can’t eat a chainsaw.

Then, back at the ranch, the house electrics began to go haywire. One of the two chargers that is the backbone of our off-grid system went bonkers and began to spit out unprecedented levels of amperes threatening us with a Chernobyl-style meltdown.

I dived for the main cut-out switch, just in time I’m sure, and, unlike this time last year when we fried the entire system, we are still, thankfully, fully-lit and computerized.

As always in this valley, however, every cloud, it seems, is somehow balanced out by a ray or two of sunshine.

The weather has indeed been beautiful and this morning we woke up to our first proper dusting of snow. The dogs charged around the garden in fits of ecstasy snapping at each other and ingesting huge mouthfuls of the white stuff.

Even better tomorrow we have our annual vodka party for our friends and neighbours in the valley. It’s one of two annual parties that we host.

The first is a reasonably cultured and civilised affair at the end of October, when we invite a small handful of grizzly biologist friends to the ranch to talk bear and raft elegantly down our beautiful river.

Tomorrow’s, if last year’s performance is anything to go by, will be a mad, frenzied free-for-all. If the grizzly biologist party is the social equivalent of Bach, tomorrow will be Iron Maiden.

Last year it was left to Kristin to emerge shortly before dawn, eject the recalcitrant hard core and detach me from a bottle of liquor as I slurred the words to Sunny’s alcoholic riffs on the guitar.

This year I promise to behave better. On a more sober note, we have another milestone to celebrate tomorrow too.

After a happy visit earlier in the year, Patrick Barkham, one of the Guardian’s most lucid and elegant scribes, has put pen to paper to detail our exploits and endeavours here in the valley.

His article is in today’s paper. The link, for the e-friendly among you, is: http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2008/nov/22/bear-watching-british-columbia-canada

For the Luddites and hold-outs who prefer your news hard, raw and on paper, you should find the article in the local newsagent in the Guardian’s travel supplement.

The last time I was in a position to flaunt our little operation to such an audience – that time it was on BBC radio - I was so scatter-brained that I forgot to mention the name of the ranch.

This time, fortunately, the ball is in safer hands. If making us out to be a little odder than we actually are, Patrick has nevertheless done us proud.

Bearspotting – The making of a nerd

We had just made it down to the river shore, scrambling and ducking under branches and around stumps, when the young grizzly bear appeared without warning just upstream.

We stood mesmerized as he moved towards us, clearly oblivious. With a bound he started in our direction, before stopping to pounce on a red salmon in the river.

We stood there, hearts beating hard, pepper-spray canisters in hand, weighing the next step. Was he alone? Was his mum around? If we sprayed him would she rush to his defence? So many unknowns.

Then the training and all those hours of studying bears kicked in.
“Never surprise a grizzly bear at close quarters.” The mantra flashed through my mind. “Always make sure the bear knows you are there.”

By now the grizzly was barely 100 feet away. We raised our arms and clapped and shouted. The bear came to a sudden and surprised halt. He circled this way and that. Then slowly he moved off into the bush.

As bear encounters go, this was an exciting one. Coming face to face with a wild grizzly fishing for salmon in the wilderness, unarmed, on foot, and on its own terms is an experience to be savoured.

On the BC coast some bear-viewing operations offer the commodified experience of watching bears from purpose-built viewing platforms. But the bears are habituated to people, predictable, and somehow distant.

We prefer the less consistent but more varied viewing that comes with operating around totally wild bears. Some are indifferent to humans, some not, but each has its own personality, history and behaviour.

The encounter with the young grizzly today somehow represented a culmination to months of learning about these icons of the wilderness.
There’s more to bears than just watching the animals themselves.

There is the scat – slightly smaller than a horse’s produce but significantly larger than a human’s. Some are red and heavy with berries, others green and apple-scented.

When the bears begin to gorge on the salmon the scats take on a grey colour and a pungent fishy smell.

Then there are the tracks. On a grizzly print the claws are further from the toe-marks than on a black bear and the ball of the foot less curved.

There are less obvious signs too: scratches and bite marks on trees that the bears like to rub and urinate on leaving their scent for the next animal that comes along.

There are bear paths through the bush and tiny snips of hair caught on twigs (black bear hair tends to be uniform in colour, grizzly hair usually varies throughout its length).

Wherever you find bears in our valley you also find sign of other co-residents. In the last few days we have spotted the tracks of elk, moose, a porcupine, a bobcat and several wolves.

Of course learning the lore of the wilderness does not happen overnight. For the past three years I have been studying the forest floor, consulting books and steadily learning.

When I came here I could scarcely tell a willow from a Christmas Tree. Now I can reliably spot a hemlock, cedar, fir, pine, aspen or birch.

I can identify Devil’s Club, thimbleberry, mountain ash, cow parsnip, horsetail and a host of other spring bear foods.

I can tell a juvenile bald eagle from a golden eagle at several hundred feet, separate a Steller’s Jay from a Clark’s Nutcracker, spot a kingfisher, an American dipper and some of the various kinds of hummingbirds.

Kristin, who was always better-versed in these matters than I was, watches the birds in our yard avidly, binoculars in one hand, Sibley field guide in the other.

Her list, which she started in the spring, includes the Downey woodpecker, black-chinned hummingbird, yellow-headed blackbird, evening grosbeak, yellow-rumpled warbler and slate-coloured dark-eyed junco. There are doves, finches, waxwings and pine siskins.

When I was younger and more callow I used to laugh at birders and biologists and their anorak ways. Politics, philosophy, wars and conflicts seemed infinitely more interesting than the natural world.

We still listen avidly to the BBC World Service, have a subscription to the Economist (surely the only one in our valley), and try to keep up with the New York Times on the web.

Georgia, Russia, Iran, Iraq and, of course, Sarah Palin are never far from our dinner table conversations.

But wilderness talk is slowly taking over: the weather, the winter, the leaves, the trees, the garden, the wild animals and, of course, and especially, the bears.

In a bid to better understand them I travelled to Knight Inlet on the west coast of BC in May and have brought experts to the ranch to train Gillian (our other guide) and me in ursine ways.

I have read studies, ploughed through books and listened to those who know more than I do.

At this time of year all that work and patience finally begins to pay off as the grizzlies appear in our valley. After the lament of my previous blog entry, nature is now making up for her former parsimony.

In the last few days, even before the latest encounter, we had seen five different grizzlies in our valley, as well as a mum with two cubs. Two of them have been really showy bears with attitude and character.

Those of you tracking my transmogrification from vodka-swilling city-slicker into turd-sniffing bear nerd will also be pleased to know of another small accomplishment.

I have recently been promised promotion to Full Bear-Viewing Guide (as sanctioned although not yet formally endorsed by the Commercial Bear Viewing Association of British Columbia).

It’s not exactly a pensionable profession, but it is certainly a new direction. Hopefully the bear encounter related above will be the first of many such thrilling meetings with these wonderful animals.

Wot - no bears?

As a slogan for our budding Rocky Mountain bear-viewing business “Wot - no Bears” doesn’t strike a very upbeat note.

It was half-jokingly fingered into the dirt on the side of one of our Land Cruisers by a guest after two hours fruitlessly waiting to see a bear feeding on local salmon last weekend.

Thankfully, a large bear did emerge in the dusk only minutes later and our guests cooed and wowed at the sight of the beautiful wild animal.

There is no disguising the fact, though, that we had a frustrating start to our autumn bear-viewing season. In three days of visiting favourite haunts our first guests managed only one grizzly bear.

(Admittedly she was a beauty. She came out unexpectedly, fished a little, stood up on her legs to watch us, fished a little more and then ran away playfully before returning to scoop up a few more salmon.
The whole scene unfolded not 40 yards from where we sitting quietly.)

Our second guests fared even worse. In three days we saw two black bears – true, that’s two more than most people have ever seen – and not a single grizzly.

Ergo the “Wot - no bears” comment. The guests were nice about it and, of course, I took it on the chin. But it certainly left us feeling more than a little worried.

Searching for answers I looked back at last year’s diary. Was I imagining it? Was there a lack of bears then too? Were we, I wondered, building our bear-viewing business on sand?

But no. Last year the bears were plentiful. Here is an entry from 21st September 2007.

“Best day so far this season! We set out in the late afternoon. Auspiciously we had barely driven five minutes when a black bear crossed the road in front of us. Ten minutes later we spotted a grizzly, again in the river and moving slowly towards the bank.

For the next 20 minutes or so we sat mesmerized as he slowly moved towards us down the river bank, fishing as he came. With the engines off and everybody silent the grizzly approached slowly, slowly until he was only a little over about 40 feet away. Then he smelled or heard something and turned and ran into the bush.

Later in the afternoon we saw deer and a young male adult moose who we slowly followed up the road for a couple of miles before he disappeared off into the forest. Then on the way back Kristin saw a small black bear cub. We celebrated that night with a glass each of Moet.”

No champagne this year although Kristin’s cooking did soothe ruffled feathers a little. We were painfully aware though that while our guests were understanding, others might have judged us more harshly.

So why the dearth of grizzly bears?

Of course the hunters don’t help. There seem to be more of them than usual crawling around the bush with their cheap beer, their potbellies and their quads.

Although they are not allowed to shoot grizzlies in the autumn, all that racket would be enough to keep any sane bear well away.

And not all of them obey the rules. One of their number shot a two-year-old black bear at the top of our valley two weeks ago (illegal) and left the bear to rot where he had shot it (doubly illegal).

In our local village the attitude of some seems to be that the only good bear is a dead bear.

In a world devoid of macho challenges they seem to think that dropping a bear at close quarters with a high-powered rifle somehow compensates for a lack of abilities in other departments.

The BC government must surely shoulder much of the blame the present situation.

For a province that attempts to stress its green credentials and officially calls itself “The Best Place on Earth” there doesn’t seem to be much of an effort to maintain that poll position.

In theory we are everything that the BC government wants: a small eco-operation with a tiny environmental footprint that brings weighty tourist dollars into an economically-challenged area.

We employ locals, buy locally and spend all our dollars in the province, despite the obvious attractions of nipping next door to tax-free Alberta or down to the US.

Yet so far all our efforts to protect the bears and create a more benign environment for them have met with bureaucratic foot-dragging and stonewalling.

On the coast, bear and nature-viewing operations are faring even worse thanks to poor government regulation.

There, ill-conceived policies regarding salmon farms have led to unhealthy levels of lice infestation in wild salmon and a cut in their numbers by up to 90 percent on some runs.

The wolves may starve there and the grizzly mums will reabsorb their eggs this winter. Few cubs will be born on the coast next spring.

Our bears are doing a little better. They are also finally beginning to emerge this year – our last groups of guests saw 10 bears altogether, more than half of them grizzlies.

On the coast and in Alaska the big bear-viewing operations habituate bears to predictable human behaviour mostly around man-made spawning channels in a bid to keep the numbers up. (The bears basically know where they are allowed to go and where they are not.)

We prefer wilder, less predictable bears in a natural habitat. It is such a thrill to meet a wild grizzly on its own terms in the bush or on the river.

But in dealing with nature, I suppose, a degree of uncertainty will always be part of the equation. When it comes to seeing bears, there will always be days of plenty and days of famine.

Missing fingers and squashed toes

For a while I thought I was just being ham-fisted. I have never considered myself a clumsy type yet since moving to the BC wilderness I have been beset by a string of minor accidents and mishaps.

First there was the heavy metalled door I dropped on my unshod foot, which turned my toes blue and swollen. I hobbled and limped around painfully for days while they recovered.

Then there was the time my psychopathic horse (ex-horse – he’s now molesting others) stood on me, rendering me useless for the better part of a week, a supine and grumbling slave to whisky and ibuprofen.

There have also been countless pulled muscles, blood blisters, scrapes and scratches – not that they really count.

And more than a few close shaves. Last year a log-splitter I was handling neatly crushed the end of my gloves - missing my fingers by a precious inch or two.

During raft guiding training I took a particularly nasty tumble as we flipped a raft in a class IV rapid which left me briefly trapped underwater and feeling like a drowned rabbit when I finally emerged.

While on an industrial ATV riders’ course I lost control of a machine with a heavily-weighted trailer on a steep hill but somehow remained upright.

Doing my best to learn from my more egregious mistakes and a surreptitious study of my smarter and fully-digited neighbours in the area, I began to take precautions.

I bought a pair of handsome of Kevlar trousers to use with my chainsaw, helmets for the whitewater raft and lifejackets for the lake.

I began to use safety glasses and ear protectors while operating the brush-cutter and circular saws. I invested in a fine pair of boots with steel toecaps and some heavy-duty leather gloves.

Then last week, during a genteel early afternoon kindling-making session (you take a piece of cedar in one hand and reduce it to small slivers with a sharp utensil held in the other) my axe slipped.

Of course I was wearing neither heavy leather glove nor Kevlar pants nor eyeglasses. The axe, an excellent and sharp implement made in Finland, sliced gracefully into my left hand.

I realized that there was something wrong when my hand began to go numb and the blood started flowing. Terrified I had lost a digit, I scanned the immediate area and then my hand but thankfully all was still in place.

My rigorous first aid training is a weighty asset in the bush but treating oneself amid waves of nausea and lightheadedness is not an ideal scenario.

Thankfully Nick, a guest staying at the ranch with his family, volunteered his assistance and drove me the hour or so to the nearest doctor’s surgery down on the lake.

By late afternoon I was being stitched up by a doctor who spoke to me in Ukrainian and a nurse who professed great admiration for Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the late iconic Soviet dissident.

Of course there was a brief wave of interest from friends and neighbours when I returned to the ranch bandaged and medicated.

But in a community of loggers, carpenters and industrial mechanics my injuries merited precious little discussion.

“Oh,” said Lynda, our neighbour to the north, clearly underwhelmed, “Dick cut his whole thumb off with an axe.”

Sunny, who lives a mile to the south and once fell 30 feet off a roof and lived to tell the tale, was even less compassionate. “He’s just trying to get out of work,” he told anyone who would listen.

I used to think that covering a war as a news correspondent was one of the more dangerous occupations you could opt for in life. But for all the bullets and shells, most of my friends emerged unscathed.

It’s true that the stresses of the work pushed many to bouts of heavy drinking. The occasional colleague – often, unfortunately, the most talented - was killed or left with a lifelong injury.

But for every war correspondent maimed or scarred there were dozens who came away with little more than disturbed dreams and the vivid but fading memories of a few close calls.

During my decade on the frontlines I escaped serious injury altogether.

The closest I came to losing a limb was probably when a rat bite, sustained during a vodka-drinking session with the Russian special forces in a sauna in Chechnya, turned septic.

By contrast, here in the backcountry, it sometimes seems that every other person has a shortened finger, a badly broken bone or the old whitened scar lines of a metal object through the arm or leg.

Lars, our renewable energy expert who just left yesterday after installing a new well pump for us, told the story of how he skewered his hand with a knife while winter camping.

As he fought to control the spurting blood, he had to ski several miles through the frozen bush to reach the nearest medical help.

Eric, who has hear just this morning, had his third finger crushed when a large rock fell on it.

So, perhaps, on reflection, I am not as accident-prone as I thought.
Living in the wilderness, working with chainsaws, axes, angle grinders and half-fallen trees, I suppose you have to pay your dues.

With this in mind and a heavy dose of fatalism, tomorrow I plan to head out to finish the pile of cedar kindling still waiting to be split. This time, however, I will be wearing one heavy leather glove.

Bears and the Bear

Hidden away deep in the Canadian bush - behind the cedar and hemlock trees that blanket this small valley - emotions have been running unusually high at Grizzly Bear Ranch this past month.

The elevated pulse rates and enervated outbursts have had nothing to do with our idyllic lifestyle. Indeed the summer has passed without major incident and the weather has been mostly beautiful.

We have not been flooded this spring (the first year in three), the summer wildfires have been small and tame (and dealt with efficiently) and even the river bank has eroded more slowly than normal.

Our wacky neighbours, for their part, have been uncharacteristically restrained.

O’Shea, our nemesis in the valley who runs a deposit-only scrapyard a few miles down the road, has been noticeable by his absence and his herd of itinerant horses are now down to only one sad-looking mare.

Dibble, the scourge of Canada’s drink-driving laws who made a lasting impression at our wedding last year when he showed up in his pajamas and drank the place dry, hasn’t been seen since the spring.

Our guests, for their part, have been delightful – an eclectic mix of Brits, Americans, Australians and a sprinkling of other nationalities who have all been great company and left with smiles on their faces.

No. The source of anxiety has come from an altogether different quarter – a small country halfway around the world.

Ever since Russians tanks rolled across the border into South Ossetia last month we have been glued to the BBC international television news. (This thanks to our satellite dish - fastened atop an old cedar stump in the yard that is home to a family of woodpeckers.)

As a recent Moscow correspondent who chronicled Putin’s descent into autocracy and made many trips to Georgia, my feelings were a mixture of on-and-off wish-I-was-there annoyance and anger at the Kremlin’s bolshy bullying tactics.

I spent plenty of time with the Russian military in my day – I once spent a clandestine week-long stint with Spetsnaz in Chechnya where I masqueraded as a uniformed special forces Captain – and know well their capacity for arrogance and callousness.

I have also spent countless hours interviewing the victims of Moscow’s brutal security forces throughout the Caucasus and seen more broken limbs, cigarette burns and smashed fingers than I care to remember.

My father, born in Hungary at the beginning of World War 2, grew up under Moscow’s hegemony and later fought the wave of Red Army tanks that swept into his homeland to crush the “counter-revolution” of 1956.

But for all my raised hackles, Kristin, an Estonian, who by virtue of her nationality is unaccustomed to emotional outbursts of any kind, was thrown into a blue funk by the Russians’ latest bout of aggression.

Therefore-but-the-grace-of-God has been a common enough sentiment among the Balts, who managed to slip the imperial leash while Mother Russia was licking her post-Cold War wounds during the early 1990s.

As Moscow, flush with gas and oil revenues, has meddled and postured in Ukraine and central Asia that sense has hardened into deep suspicion. The invasion of Georgia pressed home just what an achievement Nato membership was for those Baltic tiny states.

Back in our little valley we too are launching a campaign of sorts though it will involve neither military hardware nor ostentatious land-grabbing.

Since a brief moratorium in 2001, the BC government, pressured by diehard trophy hunters, has given out hundreds of permits each year to shoot the dwindling population of grizzly bears.

In our valley this translated in the spring into a hollering bunch of camouflaged men bagging a grizzly bear with a high-powered rifle just a few miles from our front door.

Most BC residents are against grizzly-hunting – the hunt is purely for sport as grizzly meat is rarely eaten – and indeed a recent poll shows that more than 70 percent oppose it.

To try and capitalize on the notion that these great icons of the wilderness should be protected, we have added our small voice to the legions that are now calling for a ban on the trophy hunt.

It seems that a provincial government that is a self-avowed champion of green causes should be embarrassed to be associated with such an outdated sport.

As part of our little effort we have started the Grizzly Bear Fund, a modest effort aimed at collecting a couple of thousand dollars a year that will go towards bear conservation.

We propose putting half into local initiatives such as education about avoiding bear-human conflict and subsidizing solar-powered electric fences to make them more affordable for farmers. (The fences keep the bears from the farmers’ chickens and pigs – an ursine death sentence in our area.)

The rest will go towards trying to get the province to rethink. With the Winter Olympics set to be hosted in Vancouver in 2010 we may even have a little leverage. Who knows? Grizzly bears could become to Vancouver 2010 what Tibet was to Beijing 2008.

Of course, our effort is small and lacks the melodrama of a mechanized cross-border incursion. But an attempt to save these magnificent creatures seems a worthwhile goal.

In a moving boost to our campaign, Jessie Kolvin, an 11-year-old guest from London who was here earlier this month, gave her $20 holiday pocket money to help the cause.

Other guests this year have also given. If you would like to contribute financially - no pressure at all - all donations will be very gratefully received and we will promise to put them to good use.

Kristin recently gave $100 from her dwindling financial reserves (her bank account doesn’t seem to have been up to much since she met me and gave up the good life) to help refugees in Georgia.

There’s not much else we can do about the Russian aggression. But saving BC’s grizzly bears – that is perhaps a more realistic goal and certainly one that is closer to home.

Who knows – with a bit of determination and patience and a growing consensus in this province - it may even work.




For more information on the Grizzly Bear Fund and an online option to donate to the fund please go to www.grizzlybearranch.ca/rb06/fund.html

The Thrill of the Chase

It certainly caught me at unawares when news came through of Radovan Karadzic's arrest.

As a foreign news correspondent with the Daily Telegraph I spent years chronicling the Bosnian war and its aftermath.

Much of the barbarity visited upon the victims of that war emanated from the Bosnian Serb capital Pale and a small coterie of crooks and generals centred around Karadzic.

In late spring 1996, as a junior reporter, I travelled to eastern Bosnia in search of the missing dead from Srebrenica, Europe's worst post-war massacre, after a tip-off from a Bosnian Serb.

I remember arriving in the run-down town of Vlasenica,ethnically-cleansed of its Muslim inhabitants by Serb paramilitaries four years previously.

As more sensible journalists covered the daily news out of Sarajevo I spent morning, noon and night with a nationalist local trying to prize out the location of the dead.

It was one of the first times I had been trusted alone with the company's money and the cost of my translator, the hire car and the hotel mounted day by day.

As I sat with this obnoxious local, drinking rakija - the local firewater - and smoking cheap smuggled cigarettes, I waited patiently for the information I knew he had.

Finally, after a particularly venomous and enduring diatribe against the Muslims, my host seemed to exhaust himself and flopped back in a chair.

"So you want to see the bodies from Srebrenica," he said. I nodded. "Ok, let's go," he said resignedly.

An hour or so later we were slithering up a rocky incline on the side of a mountain near the hamlet of Kravica in my rented Lada Niva. The road was treacherous and there was a steep drop-off on one side.

As we approached the crest of one particularly difficult incline the wheels began to slip on the loose gravel and I feared the car would lose all grip and slide backwards.

Just at that point I saw a body lying across the road. I hesitated a split second, decided against trying to stop the car at such an impossible angle, and ploughed on.

From the top of the mountain, decaying bodies could be seen in every direction. Hundreds of Muslim men, young, old and middle-aged, gunned down as they fled.

I stood transfixed, unable to comprehend the scale of the slaughter of these unarmed men and unable to fathom the motives of my Bosnian Serb host who had brought me to this terrible place.

The killing, indeed most of the slaughter of Muslims in Bosnia, was the handiwork of Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic.

Together with Slobodan Milosevic, the leader of Serbia, they had crafted a plan to rid the Serb-held parts of Bosnia of its Muslims.

I always felt ashamed that having indicted Karadzic and Mladic on charges of genocide the west never made more of an effort to catch the two master criminals.

While we poured resources into the hunt for Saddam and bin Laden, 13 years has been a long wait for the widows of Sarajevo and eastern Bosnia.

Once in the late 1990s I even persuaded my newspaper to let me go and look for Karadzic myself.

I spent several days in the hills and villages of eastern Bosnia in the company of diehard nationalists.

Colleagues of mine, some no doubt motivated by the $5 million dollar bounty on his head, also sought Karadzic, although it was a risky business.

It was then with some emotion that I watched as the bearded new age healer with a silly decorative bobble on his head was finally taken into custody.

The Daily Telegraph ran a long story I had penned about Karadzic's early life.

I wrote it a decade ago and have not worked for the paper for three years but apparently it had been languishing in their computers and they dredged it up for the occasion.

Living here in our British Columbia valley, I am sometimes reminded of the steep treed valleys and magnificent rugged mountains of Bosnia.

One of the lesser reported aspects of that country is its sheer beauty.

Of course there is no ethnic cleansing here and the armed men that rove through the forest are mostly just locals on quad-bikes hunting animals.

When asked why they spend their hard-earned holidays trying to shoot a bear, a moose, or some other animal of the wilderness fighting a slow losing battle for survival, they like to talk of the thrill of the chase.

But it seems to me that, unless it is food you are after, there is not much sport these days in taking down an animal with a high-powered rifle through a scope.

For me, and my colleagues of the 1990s, each of us trying to change the world in our own little way, the thrill of the chase was trying to run to ground a man responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of civilians.

That, it seemed, was a noble cause.

In the end it was not western journalists who brought Karadzic to justice but the relentless pressure of the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague.

The victory, however belated, is nevertheless a real one. A precedent needed to be set.

The next budding mass murderer may possibly hesitate, if only for a second, before embarking on such a bloody course.

Now we must just hope that Ratko Mladic, Karadzic's military counterpart, is collared too and joins him to face the music at the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague.

I may even get another dusted-down political obituary in the Telegraph. More importantly justice for the victims of Bosnia may then finally be at hand.

On that day, here in my beautiful new home, surrounded by the best that nature has to offer, I will drink a quiet toast to the prosecutors, investigators and the courageous witnesses who came forward and made it possible.

Cooking in the Wilderness - Kristin's Column

I know this is usually Julius' slot for rambling on about life in the bush, adventures in the wilderness and anything else that takes his fancy, but for once I'm stealing his thunder for an important announcement: I'd like to tell you about the arrival of the Grizzly Bear Ranch Cookbook.

This book came about mainly thanks to long winters in Alaska. Julius and I have spent the last two winters in Anchorage and with very short days and too much free time on my hands, I decided to start this little project.

There were a few selfish reasons behind it as well. I love to eat and I thought this book would make a nice souvenir for guests and friends who have stayed with us and asked me to share a recipe or two. So, here they are with my apologies to those who never received that email with a recipe for lasagna or cranberry-orange bread.

There have also been a few other inspirations. As mentioned I love to eat and I also love to cook. I don’t consider myself a chef by any means – I don’t have any professional training – but over the years cooking has offered me so much joy that if I’m passionate (in an Estonian, understated way) about anything, then it’s good food.

Sometimes it has come with the price of making Julius not too happy. He has sometimes tried to have a conversation with me while I’m enjoying something delicious on my plate and after few minutes of no luck, the dialogue has turned into a monologue and then there’s a long, awkward silence until my plate is clean. Sorry, Julius.

In my early childhood my granny Sammi was the only person who actually had the patience to have me hanging around the kitchen, covered in eggs and flour. By the age of eight I could bake bread by myself and quite soon managed to bake twist buns and cinnamon rolls. It certainly was a messy affair and I still remember that cleaning the kitchen took me longer than the whole baking process.

Fortunately, that never deterred me from starting all over again the next day and being able actually to cook something from scratch gave me the courage to see the potential of delicious dishes behind very basic ingredients.

People who have been to our house know that we have quite a few cookbooks. These books come to my rescue when I’m running out ideas. Though I don’t follow most recipes step-by-step, they are a major source of inspiration to me. Mark Bittman, Ina Garten, Bobby Flay, Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver, Mario Batali, Paula Deen and Alton Brown are just a few favorite authors among many and based on these names you can see that I do watch quite a bit of Food Network Television.

The best baking cookbook I’ve ever used is called King Arthur’s Flour Baking Book – it has a very scientific approach to baking. Books on every possible way of cooking by the Culinary Institute of America have also been a great help in improving my knife skills and cooking vocabulary.

Two years of living in British Columbia have made me appreciate the quality and importance of locally sourced and produced food. Almost all the produce we serve is of British Columbian origin and usually organic. That applies to wine and beer as well.

Great ingredients can be easily turned into great meals and this book is about basic,
good home cooking without any fancy twists. All the ingredients should be available in your local food store and should not break the bank either.

If you would like one of my new cookbooks, you can either drop by at the ranch and pick one up (not easy for a lot of you, I know) or order or download your very own copy online.
Please go to the following link:
http://www.lulu.com/content/2497999
and follow the instructions.

Enjoy!

Kristin

General Winter's last stand

Just when we thought the winter was finally well and truly over last week the skies opened and the snow began to tumble out with a vengeance.

Not the pretty white flakes that settle for a moment and then instantly melt leaving just a small glistening trace of their short magical life.

But huge great gobs of the stuff straight from the freezing Heavens, covering the roads in a treacherous six inch deep carpet and smoothing out the sharp edges of the Alaskan landscape.

It may be mid April up here in Anchorage but it seems that the Arctic God of Weather is not bound by the laws that govern the actions of his more southerly cousins.

Even for Alaskans the latest venting of meteorological fury came as a bit of a shock. They were just beginning to put away their studded tyres and stow their snowblowers when the latest blizzard hit.

Back in the mists of time when the first snow arrived (early last November) we had welcomed it, wilderness neophytes that we are. “Isn't it pretty,” I had said. “Ooooooh. Lovely,” Kristin had cooed.

But now, six months later, we have grown to dread the arrival of the cold, cloying stuff each morning. It sticks to your boots, freezes your bones and follows you wherever you tread.

**************

Ott, a friend visiting from Estonia (Kristin's mother country), was, however, pleased as punch. Two years ago when he arrived at the ranch in March he had been delighted to find several feet of snow still on the ground.

With barely a moment's hesitation he had attacked it with gusto, shovelling it with abandon. He worked with a gleam in his eye, like some tireless but happy Nordic giant brought back to life for just such a task.

By the end of Day 3 Ott had created a new world of pathways and roads in our snow-laden garden. Roads led to and from each of the cabins, to the workshop and to the main house. There were even carefully-edged little junctions and what looked like passing lanes.

So this time as Kristin and I ran for the snowblowers Ott happily grabbed for the shovel, stopping only occasionally for a refill of beer to steady the hand.

***************

Kristin, my beloved wife and partner-in-wilderness-crime, is now officially an author. Her first book, a biography of an Estonian philosopher called Nikolai Maim, has just been published.

Part of a series on Estonian thinkers and other notables, it will soon be available in bookshops. As it is written in Estonian, however, you may have to brush up on your northern Finno-Ugric language skills if you want to make the most of it.

For those unfortunates amongst us who don't read fluently in Estonian, I will keep you updated on a possible English translation. No plans yet is the word from the horse's mouth.

****************

On the penultimate day of Ott's visit we decided to take him to the zoo. Although we live almost within spitting distance, we had never been and were keen to see the animals, especially those native to Alaska.

Like most zoos, Anchorage's is a rather sad and shabby place where the beasts are caged in all-too-small compounds and subjected to gaggles of screaming school chilren.

It was nice to see the wolves, even in their spatially-impoverished surroundings. There were grey and black and beautiful.

But the animal I was most keen to study up close - the wolverine - was, unfortunately, nowhere to be seen. Kristin and I fancied we saw one of these rare weasels during our first year at the ranch while we were hiking up in the high country.

Since then Kristin has decided it was probably a hoary marmot (nothing like a wolverine) but I have stuck stubbornly to my story.

The grizzly bears at the Anchorage Zoo were certainly something to behold. Weighing in at half a tonne each, they had recently woken from hibernation.

But as thrilling as they were physically it was depressing to see them dance and beg for food from the one of the zoo workers.

********************

So next week we finally head back to Canada and our beloved ranch. As we think of the greening garden, the arrival of the spring birds and the awakening of the wildlife the days up here are beginning to drag.

By mid May the temperatures should be well into the twenties and the wildflowers will be beginning to bloom by the roadside.

Bookings for this year are good and I can hardly wait to get my knees dirty and my fingers grimy messing around in the garden again.

Once we get back it will be pretty much non-stop until the end of October. We have bears to spot, mountains to climb and, pending government permission, two wildlife-viewing stands to build.

For those of you planning on visiting us this year, we look forward to welcoming you all. The omens are good, General Winter is finally on the retreat and it promises to be a good one.

From Skid Row to the Suburbs

I admit it was an impetuous and poorly-judged decision.

I had just arrived in Anchorage for my annual teaching assignment at the University of Alaska and the temperature was twenty-plus degrees below freezing.

I spent the first night at a sleazy motel not far from the airport. The walls were thin, the carpets reeked of old cigarette smoke and daylight seemed to come and go within the blink of an eye.

After months surrounded by the magnificent Selkirk mountains, fast-flowing rivers and gorgeous vistas at our wilderness home in British Columbia, I felt caged, miserable and desperate to get out.

When an apartment became available I jumped at the chance. It was small. It was expensive. It was uncomfortable. It was garishly decorated with the worst of faux Alaskan kitsch.

But I simply couldn't bear the motel so I took it and handed over an unwisely large fistful of e-dollars through an online payment system to a smooth-talking agent.

The very first night in my new residence I realised I had made a mistake. Not 20 yards from my bedroom windows was a busy highway. Cars, trucks and lorries rumbled along well past midnight.

After months in the wilds where every nocturnal sound means something, this was more than my heightened senses could take.

With Kristin still in Canada, I determined to put a brave face on the discomforts of my new life. It would only, after all, be for four months. The neighbourhood, surely, would make up for it.

When I trotted off to the university on the first day of term, my fellow professors soon put paid to that notion.

"You live where!?" said Ron, a colleague and former public relations man with the Anchorage Police. "But that's the ghetto. That's where the Bloods hang out. That's a bad part of town." He stretched out the word "bad" making it sound even more sinister than it otherwise would.

Glen, another colleague, was equally unimpressed. "You live up by that Carr's [supermarket] on 13th? I only go to that area when I'm looking for a really shady bar."

Fred, the head of department, muttered to me with a furrowed brow: "It wouldn't look good if the Atwood Chair was knifed on his way home from work." I could tell he was only half joking.

The next day I took the local bus to work and began to see what my colleagues meant. In Alaska, it seems, only the poor, destitute and clinically insane travel by public transport.

Each day there would be a new collection of misfits and weirdos on Bus No 15. Drunks, bag ladies, down-and-out Natives (Alaska's indigenous population) and people who argued loudly, usually with themselves.

Heading to the local Carr's a few days later, I witnessed a fight between two local bums. It was really only screaming and shouting as they were both too drunk to land a punch.

As poor districts went - and I have seen a few in my years trawling round the third world in search of news stories - this one wore its suffering on its sleeve.

Being truly poor anywhere in the world must be tough, but to be in the suffocating grips of penury while living in the richest and most powerful country on earth must be doubly galling.

Each day as I walked to the grungy supermarket (I was carless at the time) I would see the people who had fallen between the cracks of the American dream. I began to feel a quiet empathy for them.

I even developed an absurd sense of pride in my new neighbourhood. When people asked where I lived I would say "Denali and 15th" daring them to respond.

If they didn't rise to the challenge I sometimes added: "You know, by the Carr's on 13th. Down in the 'hood."

But just as I was settling in, my flirtation with life in the ghetto came to an end. For one, Kristin wired me a chunk of money and my bank balance climbed out of double digits.

Then came two momentous events: the purchase of a fancy Land Cruiser (our plan is to use it to take guests wildlife-viewing back at the ranch) and the arrival of Kristin, a far more sensible and down-to-earth human than I.

As to the former, I couldn’t even park my beautiful new purchase in my adopted part of town. The temptation for the locals to strip it of its exterior paraphernalia would, I am sure, have been overwhelming.

I had visions of bumping into my tough new neighbours at the supermarket with the large gold-coloured emblems that had recently adorned the back of my car hanging around their necks on chains.

Down-heartedly I parked the Toyota elsewhere and continued to take the bus to work.

A week later, and with Kristin now in Alaska and unimpressed by the ghetto, we moved. We found a beautiful little apartment in a gorgeous house in posh southern Anchorage.

Sally, the charming landlady, runs the place as a highly succesful Bed and Breakfast in the summer (if any of you are coming to Anchorage look up www.alaskamangymoose.com) and rents out bits of it in the winter.

We are now living the lives of the privileged American middle class. Each day we drive to the local shopping centre, we drive to work, we drive to the woods, or we simply drive. That's what middle-class Alaskans do.

Nothing, but nothing, is within walking distance and if the buses do come down this far I bet they run empty, shunned by the well-to-do locals who wouldn’t be seen dead sharing a vehicle with a stranger.

It's very pleasant here and many days we look out of our windows and see moose walking through the snow. There's not a poor person in sight and most of the land is marked "Private Property - Keep Out."

If the temperature is a little chilly we can even start the Toyota from inside our house, saving the inconvenience of those first few minutes with a cold bum.

I can't pretend that I preferred the apartment on 15th. But I no longer have that note of proud defiance in my voice when I tell someone my address.

My street cred in the eyes of the local toughs, never high, has evaporated altogether.

Last week I dropped by the old apartment on 15th to give back a key to the postbox I had mistakenly taken with me.

As I hurried back to my leather-upholstered 4x4 and pulled away from the curb I found my nose rising a shade as I surveyed my former neighbours.

I couldn't help but wonder: "How could I ever have lived in a part of town like this? These aren't my sort of people."

The transformation from streetwise urban gangsta to the male equivalent of a soccer mum was complete.


For more posts go to www.grizzlybearranch.blogspot.com.

Flirting with the Alaskan car market

The temperature hovered around minus twenty, and the roads were layered in ice. But even at two in the morning the car rental agent in the bowels of Ted Stevens international airport at Anchorage managed a pearly smile.

Perhaps it had something to do with the financial knife he was holding at my neck.

"Oh, yes Sir, the car you booked is $17.90 a day. Just like it says online. Of course there will be some additional fees. Perhaps a little extra for the insurance. The total for the week: just over $360, Sir."

Well, call me a financial illiterate, but even at two in the morning that one woke me up. I opened my mouth to protest—and then slowly shut it again. I was too tired to argue.

Back home in British Columbia our trusty blue Dodge pick-up, Bob, had gone to the knacker's yard after coming a cropper on the road. He was big, comfortable and warm.

My rental at Ted Stevens was small, pokey and frigid. It had been washed and left in the car park so that the doors and the boot were frozen. Only when I hit the highway the next morning did I realise what a thrill this little beast would be to drive. Here, in the Arctic in mid-January, it was wearing summer tyres.

Each time I pushed the gas, the only change was a light on the dashboard display saying: "Poor traction, ice possible." Really!, I thought.

When we did get moving, it was the brakes that made no difference. Given the mixture of slick snow and ice, the brain on the brakes' anti-blocking system decided that the appropriate course of action was to do nothing.

I slid across three-lane highways, sailed through stop-signs, and sat uselessly at green lights, wheels spinning under me, as impatient locals pushed up behind.

In another city I might have hoped to share my icy misery with other drivers as we sat at traffic lights and stop-signs. Here in Anchorage all I could see were the exhaust pipes, mudflaps and oversized tyres of oversized trucks, almost all of the tyres with shiny metal studs.

I craned my neck to see the faces of my fellow motorists. When they did look down, there was pity in their eyes, if not disdain. I was going through winter in the driving equivalent of leather-soled brogues, while the rest of the town was wearing crampons.

Back at the ranch, we were running our surviving second car on a bio-diesel blend, recycling all our waste, using compact fluorescent light bulbs and not using chemical fertiliser.

Alaska, its wealth drawn from oil, seemed to live in blissful ignorance of the environment. In my small apartment in Anchorage there was more wattage in the bathroom lighting than in our entire house in BC. Each day, as I heard the same ad on the local radio—"If you gonna buy a car, it oughta be a four b'four"—it seemed to make more and more sense.

And so, finally, the $60-a-day in rental fees still eating away at my pocket, and painfully aware that Bob would have to be replaced, I logged onto the local classified ads.

I found a car to dream of. A perfect vehicle for our summer alpine tours. A perfect car for watching bears in the spring and the autumn. A Toyota Sequoia. A jewel from the crown of the Japanese carmaker.

"Can I see it?" I asked the lady owner excitedly when I got through to her. We made a date for that very afternoon. With her two children nagging in the back seat, I kicked the tyres and drove the car around the parking lot.

Sorry I hadn't been able to see it yesterday, she said smiling, she had been at Church. It was a shame to sell it, she said, but she wanted to pay for her eldest to go to a Christian school.

I rejoiced inwardly. Surely Christians don't smoke and spill beer in their cars. Christians don't cut crashed cars in two and glue them back together.

We came to a provisional deal and that evening she wrote me an e-mail confirming terms. And then she backed out. A better offer. I thought unGodly thoughts about her for the rest of the day.

In the end I bought a Land Cruiser. If the seller was a Christian, he didn't mention it. A government biologist, he was smart, funny, urbane and political. He was selling the car because he could no longer justify the emissions, he told me unprompted. His family had bought a Highlander Hybrid.

I instantly agreed to buy. Didn't I want to drive it? he asked. Er, oh yes, maybe. Didn't I have any questions? I struggled to think before asking lamely: Have you crashed it?

And so, if all goes according to plan, if my biologist comes through, and if Canadian customs grants an import licence, our guests at the ranch this year will be in for a treat—a Land Cruiser with big wide seats and a serious 4x4 system, getting us to the top of our wonderful trails in comfort.

And, after that, in the evenings, a glass or two of wine, Kristin's incredible dinners, and a sundeck by the river. Assuming, of course, I survive my remaining journeys in the rental.

Topsy-turvy mishaps

It came out of the blue and just as we were finally beginning to enjoy
the drive. Without warning the rear wheels lost traction and shot
violently to one side.

Then our large, heavily-laden pick-up truck slewed onto the opposite
side of the road.

I counter-steered as gently as I could, trying to keep the front
wheels straight and, it seemed, for just an instant, that I might
possibly hold the beast.

But, like a fisherman struggling in vain to grip the slipperiest of
eels, I lost it again. We hit the kerb, hard, and the truck began to
roll.

It rolled violently: onto its roof, back onto its wheels and then on
to its roof again. The glass on my side shattered and I felt, or
perhaps saw, snow, and then sky, and then more snow.

As the world turned topsy-turvy, everything seemed so wrong: this was one of those things that is only supposed to happen to other people, like the death of someone close or being cheated by one that you love.

I had, like everyone, seen such things often enough: the crushed
metal, shattered glass, blown tyres and leaking fluids that are the
hallmarks of a high-speed car crash.

Last year, driving down from Alaska in May to return to our home in
British Columbia, I had even come across a lady who had just rolled
her car off the road and lay trapped inside.

The outside air temperature was dropping rapidly towards zero and she
was clad in little more than a T-shirt. With her body going into
shock, hypothermia was threatening to finish her off.

I pulled her out through the shattered windscreen, slowly, tenderly
even, ignoring her bloody hands, praying that she didn't have a spinal
injury. The nearest ambulance was more than 90 minutes away.

We drove to Alaska last winter too but I hadn't been keen on doing the
trip again. It was less the danger than the aching muscles and
monotony of a journey that, in winter, takes the best part of a week.

I considered myself, truth be told, a competent and seasoned driver
after more than 20 years experience in as many countries, without more
than the smallest of knocks to blemish my record.

I had even taken courses - one on combat driving paid for by the
newspaper I used to work for - another that concentrated on maintaining
control in icy conditions.

It seemed, in the end however, the only economical way to get Kristin,
myself, our two dogs and our belongings to Alaska in time for the
start of the spring semester was to take the 2,400 mile slog through
the north.

Ironically, some of the worst driving conditions we encountered were
close to home. The combination of heavy precipitation and a
temperature around freezing point makes for treacherous permutations.

Sometimes there is slush on top and snow underneath, sometimes water
on top and ice underneath.

When the temperature drops below minus 15 or 20, conditions usually
improve, the snow and ice become crunchy, squeaky, firmer and less
duplicitous.

So as the sun climbed into the sky on the second day of our journey
and we reached the southern marches of the north (the part southerners
call the north and northerners call the south) the worst seemed to be
behind us.

I had been flipping between two- and four-wheel drive for an hour or
so - north American transmissions, for the most part, are not designed
to run in four-wheel-drive for long periods - but as we pulled out
onto a long, straight, rising hill just out of the small town of
Quesnel and saw clear tarmac ahead, I disengaged the power to the
front wheels and relaxed.

A few moments later we hit a sheet of black ice and began to slide.

In the event, we were nothing if not lucky. The opposite lane was
crowded that morning with heavy lorries heading south, as blithely
unaware of the build-up of ice as we were.

But at the moment we slid across the asphalt and spun violently over
the edge, the entire road was thankfully ours. We missed a large
signpost planted in the ground on concrete pillars by a few feet.

Later that day the driver of the tow-truck who had hauled our wrecked
pick-up off to his scrap yard enumerated the fate of the highway's
dead and wounded on his small patch.

Kristin had a few cuts and bruises on her lower legs from bits and
pieces flying through the cab as we rolled, but I had escaped without
even a scratch.

Our two German Shepherds, Masha and Karu, who had been sitting quietly
in the back seat (no doggie seatbelts for them) were also unscathed.

When the paramedics had come and gone and the local police had their
statements, we blunted the memory of the crash with a good meal and
some fine local beer.

The adventure wasn't quite over, though. Since we couldn't go on, we
had to go back and that meant two days driving on ever-worsening roads
in a rented minivan equipped only with summer tyres.

The final eight hours of the trip back to the ranch I don't think I
ever topped 30 miles an hour as signs on the highway flashed up
warnings of more black ice and heavy lorries, seemingly oblivious,
hurtled past us.

An hour or so later the radio reported three of them had collided a
few miles up the road. One of the drivers died.

Such are the perils of the British Columbia winter.

For all the snowy beauty and glorious glittering peaks, for all the
world-class skiing and idyllic wintry views, the water, ice and snow
are also agents of death and terrible injury.

As I write this I am happy to say that I am now safely ensconced in a
motel in Anchorage. Tomorrow I begin teaching. This time I came by
plane. Discretion, they say, is the better part of valour.

More on the Airwaves

I'm sure many of you must have heard plenty of me rambling on CBC radio last summer, but more promotion for the ranch today - this time on BBC Radio 4.

We arrived in the UK a couple of days ago and have been terribly jet-lagged ever since.

Perhaps that's why I completely forgot to mention the name of the ranch, the website and most other pertinent details during the interview.

Lucy, a treasured former guest who is being kind enough to help us with our PR and marketing, was flabbergasted at my amateurism!

She's right of course - I will have to try harder next time.

For those of you who have half an hour to kill, here is a link to the programme. (My interview is during the second half and begins at about Minute 20.)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/excessbaggage/index_20071215.shtml

Happy Christmas to all you - dear friends, supporters and former guests alike!

Julius + Kristin

Ice Patches and Inverters

It's been a week of close calls and minor disasters here in our beautiful little corner of the universe. Just as we thought the learning curve was beginning to flatten out.

Since moving to the ranch nearly two incident-strewn years ago, we have struggled through floods, fought off erosion, cowered under the debris of forest fires and duelled with loved-up stallions.

Meanwhile we have done our level best to set up a small, sustainable business showing off the best of our wilderness and its magnificent bears to travellers looking for something just a little special.

As the grizzly-viewing season came to an end and the last car retreated down our driveway six weeks ago, we perhaps allowed ourselves just a tiny modicum of self-congratulation.

The guests had all come and left happy, we had gone yet another year without the bank foreclosing on our beautiful little property and we were even fairly well prepared for the winter.

By mid-November when the first serious snow began to fall we had chopped, sorted, shifted and laid in our firewood. A not exactly gleaming but nevertheless serviceable snow plough sat in our yard.

All the cabins had been winterized and the summer machinery put away.

We had even planned out, and partially paid for, a three-week trip to Europe - our first together back to the Old Country (well, Old Countries, I suppose) since we left two and a half years ago.

Even our winter was mapped out. The offer extended by Alaska University to teach at their journalism faculty last year, had been renewed and accepted.

For several days we took things easy. We watched movies - a rare treat. We read old copies of the Economist and the New Yorker we had received way back during the busy summer.

We even took our two querulous dogs for long walks in the snow each day, a real luxury and something we would never have dreamed of doing during busier times.

We commented to each other on the beautiful Christmassy scenery. It all seemed so pretty, so easy, so nice. Life was perfect, perhaps a little too perfect. Then, as if on cue, everything went haywire.

It started when I plugged our Land Cruiser's engine heater (in Canada they have such weird and wonderful devices to stop automotive freezing in extreme sub-zero temperatures) into the main generator.

In the house, as Kristin watched startled, the lights burned bright, far too bright, for a fraction of a second and then our entire convoluted electrical system gave up the ghost.

The calm was now officially over. For an hour I frantically investigated with a spanner in one hand and a voltmeter in the other.

I checked the generator fuses, the main panel, the subpanel and the batteries, but all were fine. By now the long and early hours of winter darkness were fast approaching.

As I mentally ticked off all the different components, a horrible thought dawned on me. I hadn't, I couldn’t have, blown the inverter - the most expensive and precious part of our electrical system that we had bought only last year at huge expense.

I tested it. I held my breath. It was as dead as a dodo. Now under the gun, and with no power running to the house I carefully unwired the proud but inert piece of machinery.

In its place I wired in the old inverter we had removed last year. True, with this old dinosaur, it would take 10 or 11 hours to recharge our batteries, not four, but at least we would have light and water.

"That was quick," Kristin said as the lights flickered back to life. I allowed myself a tiny masculine swagger - it's not every day you get praise from an Estonian, even is she is your wife.

And then, like a series of mini IEDs controlled by some malevolent roadside gnome, our prized electrical appliances began to blow. First the wireless phone went up in smoke. Then the computer router.

As we watched incredulous the satellite television died. I rushed to measure the voltage coming through the plugs. 150 volts! This where a modest 120 should have been. Ahhhh! No wonder the electric mayhem.

When we finally sat down to count the cost we had lost four major appliances - including the brain for Kristin's shiny exercise bike. Among other things it controlled the level of stamina resistance.

Putting a brave face on the setback, Kristin sat on the stationary bike and gallantly pedalled regardless as if to say: "Don't worry, darling, I know we live in the bush, I can do without the electrics."

But as her legs spun ever faster and more erratically even she was finally forced to admit that an exercise bike without a brain was no exercise bike.

Heroic measures were now called for. After some searching I found a renewable energy whizz who could sell me a new inverter. It would cost - such machines are not cheap - but we were firmly over a barrel.

The only snag was that his location, Kelowna, was five hours drive away along mountain roads that had just been given a heavy dousing of snow and freezing rain. And the whizz was leaving for the coast in 36 hours.

Next morning early I departed at dawn leaving a worried looking Kristin on the doorstep. The first section of the road - fairly flat - was, well, bad. More like an ice rink than a highway.

When I reached the mountainous section, a single-lane gravel track 20 miles long, with a drop of several hundred feet into a lake on one side, things just got worse.

It was so slippery that at times all four wheels, each adorned with an expensive new winter tyre, spun crazily.

Then, with a wave of relief, I came across another car. The fact that this ordeal was being shared by a second human being somehow brought immense comfort.

There was also a cunning tactical element to my joy. "I'll just follow him," I thought slyly. "If he falls into the lake, I'll know not to proceed and I'll turn back."

But my new-found comrade-of-the-highways, replete with a dog as travelling companion, was showing little inclination to move. So, as I pulled alongside, I beckoned for him to wind down his window.

"Are you ok?" I asked. "Just fine," answered the man, a local as it turned out, probably in his early fifties.

"Been here long?," I ventured. "Three or four hours," came the reply. Still, maddeningly, no clue as to his motives.

"Well, what are you waiting for?" I finally demanded to know.

"On this ice," he said looking at me as if I was a fool. "I'm waiting for someone else to go first."

So over the mountain we went. Me first. Then him.

At the top of each small slope I selected first gear, four-wheel drive, low ratio. Then I would feel my heart thump through my chest as I slid down the hill with as much control as a spider heading inexorably for the drain.

Each time, as I made it down unscathed, my new friend cautiously followed. My very own plan served up to me with a brazenness that was enfuriating.

I made it to Kelowna and back. I installed the new inverter, replaced the router and fixed the TV. The exercise bike still stands neglected in the corner, but Kristin doesn’t really seem to care.

Outside the snow is falling, the dogs are barking at the shadows and in an hour or so Sunny, our much-loved musical neighbour is coming round for dinner.

As always, the conversation will be earthy in nature, practical in application and, over a bottle of wine or two, the three of us will each tell our own stories of wilderness hardship.

Infused with Dutch courage, we will laugh off the precariousness of our existence in this gorgeous and sometimes immensely inhospitable valley and toast the Gods of Fortune that have kept us here for another year.

Rednecks, hippies and batty biologists

In the annals of our small and humble valley, it was a notable gathering of scientific minds.

An accomplished skink man, a bat expert, a Chinese medicine practitioner and a clutch of bear biologists all gathered around our dinner table last weekend to swap ursine opinions.

We had sent out an invitation to the eminences of the local bear world (and their partners) with a view to soliciting their advice on how best to nurture and protect our beautiful grizzly bears.

We also wanted to thrash out best practice on thorny issues such as habituation, discuss the effect of hunting on the bears and assess the provincial government's policies.

Perhaps surprisingly British Columbia, which has an image of being one of the most wildlife-friendly places on earth, still allows grizzly bears to be hunted as trophies.

Although the wholesale slaughter of yesteryear it now outlawed, 28 permits are to be given out by the government to hunt grizzlies next spring, just in the area around our ranch.

In the event we talked a little bear, drank a deal of wine and, gorged on Kristin's cooking.

To celebrate the mini-summit on the second day we launched an impressive armarda down our river comprising our large blue raft and three inflatable kayaks.

It rained a bit and Heather flipped her kayak in the rapids but otherwise it was a wonderful day.

With the second season here at Grizzly Bear Ranch now over and the first snow beginning to fall we have decided that now is the time to get serious about our grizzly bears.

Barely eighteen months ago we still thought that the way forward for us was a mish-mash of mechanised machinery, campers in our yard and possibly - Kootenay-style - a small grow-op for when times were hard.

But the beauty, rarity and fragility of the area we now live in mean instead we are striving to become all those politically-correct cliches that we once eschewed - stewards, custodians, guardians.

In my times as a newspaper correspondent I travelled to some remarkable and picturesque places. Some where so vibrant the sense of beauty was almost tangible.

But even compared to the majesty of the Hindu Kush, the stunning beauty of the north Caucasus, the volcanic glory of Kamchatka and the craggy vistas of the Dalmatian coast, our valley, with its blue-green river set against a backdrop of snow-capped peaks, is something special.

Unfortunately not all seem to have the same appreciation for this little valley that we do.

One of the scourges of the valley is a growing number of quads. Each year more and more of these noisy machines head for our little paradise to race through the fragile alpine and along its tiny forest trails.

(Here I have a confession to make - I too am the owner of a quad and have used it on the mountain trails. Last year we even took some of our guests up into the alpine on ATVs to enjoy the view.)

Now, however, it seems half of western Canada heads to our little valley for their motorized recreation. This summer on one weekend we found around 30 riders high in the alpine on just one trail.

They all seemed to be in their sixties or older - a sort of a mobile geriatric convention. One had the temerity to ask me why I had walked up the mountain when I could have just ridden a machine.

Another meance to our valley is the beer-can-out-the-window brigade. It seems that not a day goes by that I don't pick up a can of Budweiser from the verges of the road that runs past the ranch.

Of course the easiest way to deter such environmental thuggery would probably be the Chechen method. A well-placed piece of piano wire across the road followed by a couple of minutes work with a Kalashnikov would no doubt be effective.

But this is Canada, not the Caucasus, and violent retribution is frowned upon, illegal even. Negotiation, often long and tortured and leading to painful compromise, is the way of this peace-loving nation.

British Columbia is, for the most part, socially split between rednecks (hunters, quadders, loggers, beer-drinkers) and hippies (weed-smokers, veggie-eaters, welfare-collectors).

Each have their own distinctive aspirations: Ford F350 vs Subaru, Carhatt's vs hemp biodegradable, Cabela's vs Mountain Equipment Coop.

Kristin and I were never quite sure where we fit in. We cut our own wood, but recycle our trash. We drive a big truck, but use biodiesel where possible. We love animals, but wash ourselves often.

We must be one of the few households that, in the last year have, at different times, subscribed to ATV monthly (or whatever it is called), BC Sport Fishing, The New Yorker and the Economist.

Like us, the biologists around our table last weekend were also culturally cross-starred. At least two of them hunt and one is a self-avowed former hippy and US draft-dodger.

Whatever Canada's failings, it justifiably prides itself on its high level of tolerance.

Once we were all around the table last weekend and the wine was flowing political differences were set aside and everybody was as comfortable as if they had known each other for years.

There was none of the awkward class-consciousness a room full of freshly-acquainted Brits would have felt.

Our efforts to preserve our little valley and its amazing nature will, doubtless, also have to follow a Canadian model too.

We will coil up the piano wire and try our skills with that all-too-rarely-used tool - gentle persuasion.

That is, after all, the way of the Canucks. And, happy immigrants that we are, it is time for us to verse ourselves in those arts too.

Wildlife Journal

So our second grizzly bear season since moving to the ranch is well underway. So far all our guests - and this year we have been pretty much full - have left after seeing at least a few grizzlies. Some have seen many.

To keep our guests and friends up-to-date with the latest we have started an online wildlife journal, which we will use to record our bear sightings and other interesting sightings we have here in the wilderness.

The latest is a posting of a large grey wolf, almost black in colour, photographed by Andrea, a guest from Graz in Austria, just as she left the ranch.

She wrote to us from Austria: "You must know, I'm very proud taking a picture of a wolf. First we thought, "Oh, not a bear, again a dog... but then we took a closer look and I made the picture... He was standing there really for a while, looking at us before he moved on. Studying the picture, his view, the tail, we were very sure, that it must be a wolf."

If you would like to check out our new wildlife journal, please go to http://www.gbrwildlifejournal.blogspot.com.

We have also changed our packages around a little and are now concentrating on black bear and wildlife viewing in the spring, the mountains and lakes in the summer and our grizzlies in the autumn. Please check our website for all the latest details.

Grizzly Airwaves

Fred, my lawyer and friend, called it shameful self-promotion. I prefer vanity publishing. Or, perhaps, vanity broadcasting. As if this self-indulgent blog was not enough.

Anyway, for those of you who have not had enough of my voice, both in its virtual and recorded form, CBC, Canada's state radio station, recently interviewed me about my transition from (mostly) frontline journalist to (occasional) grizzly bear guide.

If you'd like to hear how a relatively well-paid close-on-middle-aged newspaper correspondent gave up the security and expense account of a staff job at a major British newspaper and opted for penury in the Canadian bush, this is probably the definitive account.

Click here for more.

Bucking broncos and wounded pride

Buying Henry the Horse was one of the first things I did when I got to British Columbia. I simply couldn't be the owner of a ranch and a self-respecting frontiersman without my very own steed.

This most noble of acquisitions was accelerated by my impatience after many years of horselessness as I hopped from city to war zone to city during my financially productive years.

By the time the snow was off the ground last year I was simply dying to do that most western of things - to go out and find me a fine ol' stud and gallop him around the fenceline of my new piece of land.

With Henry (still going by his maiden-name Remington in those days) things went more or less badly from the start. A fine horse to look at, he soon showed himself to have a foul temper and a sneaky disposition.

I had barely taken him a couple of times around the exercise ring on a test-ride when, without warning, he began to buck and kick and snort and jump in a malicious attempt to unseat me.

I kicked him in the ribs, yanked on his reins, swore at him a little and stayed firmly seated in the saddle and eventually he settled down to a steady trot.

"Must have been a one-off," I shouted cheerily to the lady who was trying to sell him, in a strange role-reversal. She smiled uncertainly. Then Henry tried it again.

This time, again without warning, he went sideways, bucked a couple of times and then hopped and jumped first this way then that. Finally he scraped me hard against the fence.

So I bought him. For $2,500. Ill-considered? Definitely. Overpriced? Absolutely. I think the lady who sold him, a hard-nosed horse trainer from down towards the border, couldn't believe her luck.

On paper, at least, I had the skills to deal with a difficult horse. Both my brother and I were brought up on the joys of equine pursuits in leafy Royal Berkshire.

Between the two of us we fell off dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times. I smashed my teeth - I have two now well-worn gold caps to prove it - and knocked myself senseless more than once.

It was a rare day we didn't both come tumbling from our ponies as we re-enacted a full-contact version of the English Derby in the fields by our house, thrashing at the horses and each other by turn.

Later when my father moved back to Hungary and began to keep racehorses we both rode them out. The thrill of feeling one of those athletes accelerate from a jump start to a full gallop in just a few paces is not one easily forgotten.

The adrenalin-rich sensation of flying across the turf at 30+ mph on a flared-nostriled animal is difficult to match. I even began to understand why jockeys would risk life and limb for such a buzz.

With my work there was often little chance to ride. But when the opportunity came I never failed to grasp it with both hands.

In Afghanistan after 9/11 I covered the frontlines on a local warlord's horse for several weeks. I mercilessly mocked colleagues who were less horsey than I, laughing at their fear and their awkwardness.

I rode in Russia when on a journalistic swing through the Siberian mountains. I was, as I remember, the only of our distinguished party who could still mount a horse and stay on after of day of vodka.

On summer weekends I liked nothing better than to head off with close friends to a small village on the Volga where we would sauna, swim, fish and ride for hours along the riverbanks.

One time I spent a week riding in the Georgian mountains near Chechnya. I was 10,000 feet above the plains with only a Russian-speaking cowboy and the local bears for company.

Perhaps that was I bought Henry. Or perhaps it was misplaced machismo. Or perhaps I was just being impetuous, foolhardy or, as the north Americans say, dumb.

I had plenty of time to consider my motives recently as a I lay with my leg in the air, waves of pain washing through me and industrial quantities of whisky and ibuprofen coursing through my veins.

In his defence, I suppose, Henry was only being consistent. He had never made any secret of the fact that he hated being ridden. When a young French lady got on him last year he dumped her in under a minute.

At first when I saddled him up for his first ride of the year he seemed indifferent, even happy to be back at work. When I lunged him, first this way, then that, he trotted and cantered out nicely.

Encouraged, I climbed into the saddle, happily surveying the surroundings from my elevated position. Ah, how good it feels to be back on a horse, I thought.

Then, without warning, and with my feet not yet in the stirrups, Henry reared. I clung on. He went down and then straight up in the air again. This time I lost my balance and fell.

Then, to add injury to insult and as I scrambled to get out of the way of this snorting, rearing monster he brought his back hoof down hard on my lower leg and put his weight on it. Instantly it went numb.

Fear, pain and anger raced through me. "I think it's broken," I told Kristin who was looking on with horror. Then I began to chase Henry across the field, whip cracking.

Needless to say the horse outran me. He'd have done that even if I had been on two healthy legs. Kristin just stared on as if I'd lost my senses.

Nearly two weeks later I'm happy to say that, after a few days on a stick (a particularly fine ebony walking stick that was a prescient wedding present from my brother), I'm walking normally again.

My knee and ankle, which took a lot of the weight, are damaged and may take a while longer to heal. My pride longer still.

Finally common sense is beginning to reassert itself. Recklessness may have served me well in my younger years or out in the field with a large newspaper to pay my medical bills.

Here, however, I am as uninsured as any panhandler and the co-owner of a small, unprofitable business that requires lots of physical work and effort and has no time for excuses.

So it seems, on deliberation, Henry will have to go. Cola, our other horse, an aging gent who we were given and kept as a companion for Henry, left this morning for a new home with some friends.

They made the 12 mile trip to their house on foot in a little over four hours. We're pretty sure he will be loved and treasured.

And Henry? He faces a less certain future. I feel morally constrained from repeating what his previous owner told me - that even teenage girls could ride him safely.

But I'd rather not see him end up as sausages. So - anybody know a good home for this equine eccentric? It's true he is a little psychopathic but we will give him away to somebody who thinks they can use him.

Next year, when we return from our second annual posting in Alaska, we may even get another horse. This time, I promise, it will be calm, manageable and without vices.

As exciting as Henry? Perhaps not. But at least we might be able to ride him.

Heatwaves and Hailstones

Whoever said that living in paradise was going to be easy?

The year began with an onslaught of thick, white powder snow that crept up over our sundecks to the lower reaches of the windows and then up, up and up steadily towards the roof.

When that melted - and locals say that even in this notorious snowbelt it was the most they had seen for years - our beautiful turquoise river began an interminable rise until it had all but engulfed our road.

The day before our wedding in June, Highway 31 - the misnamed goat track that runs up our valley - was blocked completely a few miles to the north. It was almost underwater to the south.

Happily our guests ignored the overcautious signs pronouncing the road closed and, veterans of the impossible that many of them are, ploughed on regardless until they reached the ranch.

Perhaps our most serious setback, however, came the very evening of the wedding when several feet of our riverbank, eroded by the swollen waters, collapsed and disappeared into the swirling turmoil below.

Drunk on cider and high on love, that evening we barely noticed.

But during the days to come and after a painstaking examination of the bank that involved lots of leaning and poking at odd angles we realised we were facing a serious erosion problem.

If that wasn't enough, since the beginning of this month the sun has set out to wreak havoc too. Not to be outdone by the other elements, it beat down on our little ranch for two weeks straight without respite.

This weather is uncommon in the Kootenays region where we live and certainly untypical of our valley where sometimes we have three different types of weather at the same time.

As the sun continued relentlessly, the temperatures rose to record levels. Our little thermometer in the kitchen window peaked at nearly 55 degrees centigrade, more redolent of Baghdad than British Columbia.

Our beautiful luxuriant lawns began to wither, our myriad birds panted with their mouths wide open and our dogs retreated to suffer like baked beached whales under the house, emerging only after sundown.

Even at night we suffered. Our log house usually keeps fairly cool but this time it seems that all its natural arboreal defences capitulated in the face of the relentless solar onslaught.

Just as it seemed things could get no worse the storms arrived.

Not nice cumulonimbus pregnant with precious rain rushed straight from the cooling Pacific but harsh electric storms with gigawatts of lightning and very little moisture.

The forest to the north and south of the ranch began to burn as lightning cut deep into its parched boughs and branches. At one stage, a week ago, we had three fires within five miles and another half a dozen within 20 minutes drive or so.

With the fires, mercifully, came the firefighters and their helicopters. Descending to scoop water from our river into huge buckets they hovered over the smoke like angry wasps from dawn to dusk.

Living as we do, in the bush, we are beyond the remit of the fire brigade and will have to rely on a trusty old Honda water pump to fight the flames should they ever reach our land.

Last weekend we watched enthralled and more than a little worried as smoke billowed apparently out of control on a hillside less than two miles away.

Taking a leaf out of the book of our unflappable neighbours, we remained stoic and, with a couple of stalwart friends, drank vodka late into the night.

Last night the storms returned with a vengeance. All day our high speed wireless internet (we're not complete Luddites out here in the wilderness) had been flashing warnings.

"Severe thunderstorms. Hail. Take precautions," the BC weather service ordered. What are they thinking of? I wondered. What is one to do when the mother of all storms is on its way? Nail down the front door? Tie down the dogs?

In the event it was quite an event. First the internet connection went down. Then the picture on the television imploded and the screen went dark. A blanket of lightning enveloped the sky driving away the night.

Then the wind began to howl and the rain and hail arrived. Huge great lumps of it thudded onto our sundeck and the metal roof of the house. The dogs began to howl. We stood enthralled, hearts pounding.

For a moment I wondered about the fate of our horses. I even thought about dashing to the rescue. Kristin looked at me quizzically. I think the same thought struck us both at the same time.

Whatever the hail would do to the horses' rear ends it would do twice as badly to my head. Like a first world leader faced with an ethically-sound but politically-painful course of action, I retreated.

As I write this all is now back to normal in our little valley. We have had one of those delightful Kootenay days - all fine rain, mysterious banks of mist, gentle sunshine and even a rainbow. The hummingbirds are back in force.

The temperature outside is a respectable 20 degrees and at one point this afternoon we actually had rain at one end of the yard and sun at the other. Delightful.

It's true that - to coin a phrase - we're not quite out of the woods yet. Some of the fires are still nibbling away at our forests and the helicopters are still flying. Somebody muttered darkly about a scorcher tomorrow.

This morning I met a man who did venture out in the hail last night and for his pains took a chunk of ice on his shoulder. He told me it hurt like hell.

Now who, I thought to myself smugly, would try a stunt like that when the God of Thunder is tossing boulders around the heavens?

www.GrizzlyBearRanch.ca

A wedding by the river

It was, in the end, a notable event on the social calendar of our small, quiet valley.

Journalists and cowboys, farmers and photographers, crooners, lawyers, professors, biologists, bikers, loggers, carpenters and former soldiers all came together earlier this month as Kristin and I got married at the end of our garden.

For those of you who are followers of this blog - and I claim no grand or great readership - my apologies for the tardiness of this posting. We have simply been overwhelmed with preparation, the event itself and the inevitable clean-up.

Seducing our family and friends all the way to our remote valley from their homes in Europe and beyond, we offered the promise of a wedding that would last a week or more. And it did. The first guests arrived at the end of May and the last to leave pulled out of our driveway only a week ago.

The Estonians were a force to be reckoned with. They set up camp on the northern marches of our land, drank prodigiously and shoveled down huge quantities of roast pig.

The Hungarians, who arrived by camper van, took the southern flank and distinguished themselves by conjuring up a goulash for 30 (actually it was a porkolt for those of you who are experts in the cuisine of the Magyars) and some mighty fine folk dancing on the big night.

Many more, and we live in a valley with an eclectic mix of characters, came from just a few miles down the road.

All were greeted at the gate by two former British Guards officers - one from the Grenadiers, the other from the Irish (my brother) - resplendent in Chechen headgear and Yugoslav Chetnik-style attire.

They carried the necessary accessories and a handsome bottle of Polish vodka with which to greet the guests.

At the appointed hour we all gathered by the river. Patricia, a friend from Winnipeg, read the short ritual - although I'm not sure who heard it over the raging river - and we made our vows.

At the moment of greatest solemnity we were joined by Masha, one of our young German Shepherds, who insisted on cozying up to the new union.

Then the party began. Hank, a self-styled cowboy from nearby Meadow Creek, let loose with superior country rap accompanied by a mouth organ. Great songs that strongly featured cows, pigs and waggons.

Sunny, our neighbour, advisor on all matters wood and good friend, crooned some beautiful old love ballads. Warren from Vancouver fetched his guitar from his camper van and joined in.

His wife Nina donned a brightly-coloured gipsy skirt and cowboy boots and danced a few rounds with Dibble, our neighbour to the north, until he collapsed, the worse for drink.

The champagne, cider and wine was joined by a large piglet, which had been carefully roasted on a spit since daybreak. The Estonians began to drink. The Hungarians began to dance.

In true Kootenays style the forgiving guests overlooked the organisational flaws - and there were a few - and the party flowed right along.

Not least of those flaws was the fact that we didn't really get married that day. Not officially anyway. In all the rush and excitement we forgot the one bit of paperwork required by the province of BC.

It took a Monday afternoon trip to Nelson, our nearest town at two hours away, and a visit to a marriage registrar to patch that one up.

Another disaster was averted early on Saturday morning when we dispatched Thomas Dworzak, an old friend with a fast car, to pick up the wedding cake which we had ordered but forgotten about. It was a return trip of four hours but he made it in time.

On days before and after the wedding we had more great times - walks among our sleepy giant cedars with bellies full of cider, hikes down half-forgotten mountain trails past roaring brooks, boating on sunny Trout Lake, exotic food, lots of fine wine and singing.

With the wedding behind us - our spring/summer season is now underway. Earlier this week we took out our first mountain tour. With Tim and June we went way up to the snowline where the wildflowers are beginning to bloom.

Penny and Sid from San Diego have also been exploring with us this week.

One of the big changes at the ranch is a major renovation of the Eco-cabin which now has its own environmentally-friendly bathroom, a beautiful new interior, a sundeck and a huge window looking onto the river.

For those of you at the wedding - thank you for making the effort to come all this way. It made for a wonderful occasion that Kristin and I will never forget.

And those of you didn't - we hope to see you soon. The sun is shining, the bears are out, the river is running blue and it promises to be a gorgeous year here at Grizzly Bear Ranch.

Glaciers and gravel strips

It's been something of an obsession of mine ever since we first arrived at the ranch. Even before we moved in I was already pacing out the yard to see where I might put a small plane down.

Every angle seemed to come with a different set of problems: one took me too close to the trees, another would have me touching down in the horse's paddock, a third clipping a guest cabin.

I reckoned, perhaps optimistically, that 1000 feet in a fairly straight line might do it. On a good day, with the right wind, perfect piloting skill naturally, optimal braking… and so on.

Two years on and I'm no closer to fulfilling that particular dream. Major obstacles to be crossed include a lack of money, lack of an airplane and an excess of awkwardly-placed trees.

That hasn’t stopped me flying, however, and this weekend in what I regard as a major personal victory I finally persuaded Kristin to come up with me (admittedly with a second pilot also in the airplane.)

My history with aviation is as varied as it is long. Terrified as a young man of even the most benign commercial flight I found myself drinking heavily before take-off and often making a fool of myself.

Once I was so drunk on arrival I sat on the baggage carousel with the bags until an official hauled me off.

Another time while taking off in a war-torn country with bullets flying around the airport I realised I was more scared of the plane than the gunmen.

Eventually I determined to rectify the situation in the only way I knew how. I took a private pilot's course in Hungary. For the first five or six hours, as I remember, I was too scared even to open my eyes.

When the flight test came along a portly old Magyar showed up with an undersized pooch, who hopped into the back of the plane. "Don't worry," said my instructor. "As long as his dog doesn’t bark, he'll pass you."

Those were the chaotic 1990s in Hungary, a period when anything was possible. A girl I met apparently passed her test with only an hour's instruction after providing sexual favours to an examiner.

Later in my life, usually between conflict assignments, I took the opportunity to move up the aviation skills ladder.

During various holidays from work I got myself a tailwheel check-out, a commercial pilot's licence, an aerobatic endorsement and a float rating for flying seaplanes.

Even during the lean years (aeronautically-speaking) I assiduously kept my medical current and made sure I had the right hours and training to fulfill the recency requirements.

The excuse for yesterday's flight was to complete my US mountain check ride.

Since arriving in Anchorage I have flown a number of times. The surroundings are so beautiful and the place so aviation-friendly it would been shame to pass up the chance.

Merrill Field, the airport in the middle of town that we flew from yesterday, is only one of four or five in the immediate vicinity and far from being the biggest.

Nevertheless it has more General Aviation planes (that's small private plans for those of you who are not aviation nerds) than any other airport in the world.

Wheel planes, ski planes, tail-draggers, amphibians. It even has an ancient beaten up model from the Soviet Aeroflot fleet that somehow made it over the Bering Strait.

In terms of airspace, Anchorage has to be one of the most complicated places in the world to fly. The proximity of the military base to the town means you must hug your prescribed altitude with the utmost care or risk having an F-15 take off your tail feathers.

The previous times I had flown here the winds and weather had made life difficult. With the temperatures way below freezing on one occasion our descent threatened to supercool parts of the engine.

Another time the winds were so high that my check ride pilot looked at me askance when I suggested we go up. I made three landings out of five, which was not too bad given the circumstances.

On the others, as the plane wobbled this way and that, I just hit the gas and went around for another go.

Yesterday forecasts were mixed as we lifted off and headed east, Kristin comfortably ensconced in one of the back two seats.

As we approached the line of the mountains the small plane began to buck and toss a little. Up above nasty looking rotor clouds showed signs of severe turbulence above the ridges.

For the first half hour or so we persevered. We flew over Knick Arm Glacier, a pure sometimes translucent blue in the grey morning. Off to the sides we saw Dall Sheep or perhaps goats clinging to the mountain slopes.

By now the plane was beginning to bump. I looked back at Kristin and she had a fixed, nervous smile on her face. She had taken out her sick bag and was clinging on to it. She was slightly green.

We headed out of the canyon and north towards the Talkeetna Mountains. Yoke back, power full in and a steady climb to 7000 feet. The cabin cooled as we moved into the higher, colder air.

And then, as if by magic, we were soaring among the snow-covered peaks, breathtaking views on every side. The turbulence disappeared along with the wind. For 10 minutes it was almost as it we were in a virgin, glittering world.

We landed back at Merrill a little over half an hour later. It was an almost perfect touchdown, though I say it myself. Taxiing back to the hanger I turned to see Kristin looking relaxed and relieved.

"What you think of the scenery," I asked animatedly.

"It wasn't too bad," she said. High praise indeed from an Estonian.

Not that I think she's off to get her private licence tomorrow. But I, as always after such a flight, am once again browsing the internet looking for cheap airplanes and loan sharks and reading up on the rudiments of a bush airstrip.

We're leaving Alaska in a couple of weeks and heading back to our wonderful valley. Can hardly wait to pace out the yard again. Maybe this time I'll find my perfect landing strip.

****

Dear Friends

We've just taken delivery of some beautiful new postcards of the ranch. Please drop us a line by clicking on mailto:info@grizzlybearranch.ca with your mailing address and we'll send you one.

Very Best Wishes to you all

Julius + Kristin

More Moosery

Living as we do deep in the Canadian wilderness, we thought that - at least when it came to local wildlife - we had seen it all.

We found a deer in our garage one morning, a black bear staring at us from just outside the kitchen window and had a grizzly mum with three cubs traipse along the river at the bottom of our garden.

From the bird kingdom we've had blue jays, humming birds, ospreys and eagles. Once a whole extended family of Canada geese took over the yard for a week leaving industrial quantities of bird turd behind.

But, as it turned out, we had to move to the city to get our first real-life wild-animal run-in.

Ever since we arrived in Anchorage a month or so ago we've been amazed by the brazen cheek of the local moose population.

These pea-brained animals, each weighing several hundred kilos (the Alaskan Moose is the biggest in the world), seem to run rampage through the largest city of The Last Frontier.

Many mornings as I walk to work, braving sub-zero temperatures, howling winds and all togged up in my Russian military sheepskin and Siberian fur hat, I come head to head with one particularly stubborn individual.

The path I and he like to walk is clear and the snow surrounding it high and neither of us want to vacate the centre line. So far we have passed each other without incident.

I've been asking around, however, and it seems I have been a trifle blasé in my dealings with this ill-tempered ungulate.

A lady at the university recounted how she had watched helplessly as another woman was charged by a moose, barely escaping with her life when she dived into the car of a passing motorist.

Another man at the university was not so lucky - he was stamped to death on his way between classrooms.

On an average day the campus police seem to spend much of their time chasing up moose alerts from terrified and newly-arrived students from The Outside, as it is known in Alaska.

When we take the dogs out to blow off some steam in the frigid Alaska winter we often have to detour around stubborn and bolshy looking animals who block the path.

But nothing quite prepared us for the arrival of one strapping young moose in our postage-stamp sized back garden last week.

It all happened when I was away at university and Kristin was working on finishing her book. We had watched nonchalantly for a couple of days as the fine fellow de-twigged the next-door neighour's trees.

He took each ice-encrusted branch into his huge, furry mouth and chewed and stripped with relish.

Then one day the moose simply stepped over the fence. Masha, the smaller of our two German Shepherds, was having none of it. The hair on her neck stood up and she began to bark ferociously and advance on the enormous beast. It was like a mouse challenging a lion.

Kristin ran to the gate to try and rescue the brainless hound but by now the Moose had got the hump and was chasing both dogs around the garden.

One clip from his formidable front hooves and it could all have been curtains for our brave and faithful canines.

Eventually the Moose got fed up. Unhurriedly, almost elegantly, he stepped over the four-foot-high fence to the next house along leaving our terrified hounds shocked and shivering.

We've learnt our lesson.

This huge northern animal may look like a sleepy, peaceable giant but when its blood is up it turns into the rhinoceros of the tundra.

On the scale of such things, it seems, a grizzly at the end of the yard is small fry. The danger won't pass we're told until the snow has gone. But by then, I hope, we'll be safely back in our Canadian wilderness.

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Winter roads and War stories

It was not an auspicious beginning.

The day we were to leave our beautiful BC home and set out on a 2,000 mile winter odyssey across the frozen north we could barely open our front door.

Three feet of snow had fallen overnight onto an already well-laden garden. Even reaching the snowplough was a manly hike. Then I couldn't get the door open. Then the plough got stuck on the first run.

It was three hours before we managed to make it the 100 yards to the end of our drive and onto the road, the winter goat track pretentiously named BC Highway 31.

Just as we began to relax the first of the dogs puked all over the back of the car.

So began our great ice-bound cross-country adventure.

A month or so before I had been offered a place teaching journalism for a semester at the University of Alaska.

The new posting gave me several opportunities.

First of all I could reengage my atrophying brain during the long barren winter months. Then it was a chance to fill up our badly-depleted coffers.

Even more persuasively it would allow me to bore a captive audience with some of the dog-eared old war stories I had been hawking around the bars of eastern and central Europe since I can remember.

Even the trip itself - 2,500 miles through the most mountainous terrain in north America at the coldest time of year - was tinged with the rose-colouring of a romantic adventure.

Until the dog regurgitated his breakfast.

Actually, the first part of the journey was the easy bit. To take up my new post I needed a US work visa. That meant an interview at the US consulate in Vancouver.

The city was, as ever, a delight. Cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic, great food. We watched Borat, howling like hillbillies as the more sophisticated cityfolk around us grew increasingly uncomfortable.

When the appointed hour came I donned a jacket and arrived at the consulate for my interview with a few minutes to spare.

Call me naïve but I imagined the whole thing would happen something like this: I would bang on a large, worn but solidly-built wooden door. A young but well-educated diplomat, probably Ivy League, would meet me.

"Ah, Mr Strauss," he would say. "Of course, we've been expecting you. We're delighted you're coming to our country. You're going to be the new professor at the University of Alaska. Super. Esteemed retired correspondent of wars and conflicts. Excellent. Now-now, Sir, don't be modest. We know you, of course, by reputation. We'll have your paperwork sorted out in a jiffy (do the Americans say jiffy?)."

The reality was disappointing and a little brutal. "If you don't get back in line now we'll have you at the end of the queue," a bad-tempered security guard balled at me as I stood with dozens of other haggard-looking desperados.

"You're not on the list!" another said when I finally reached the door, eyeing me up and down as if I was about to push a secret button and turn us both into meat shavings. I showed the man my appointment letter. Grudgingly, he let me in.

In the corridors there were large posters denouncing the evil of the 9/11 attacks in categorical language. Then a mountain of paperwork, a long wait and finally a mumbled interview through a glass screen.

The next afternoon, after another bout of queueing - "No bags, I said, or you're at the back of the queue!" the unfriendly security man barked at me this time - I finally had my visa.

That evening we set off north in the throes of a nasty winter storm driving through endless blacked-out suburbs. By midnight we still hadn’t made it to our planned stopover and I was so tired the snow seemed to be falling upwards.

In retrospect it wasn't such a bad trip.

We took the stunningly beautiful Stewart Cassiar highway, a deserted and partly gravel road that runs 400 miles up the inside of the Coastal Mountains, and saw about four cars all day.

Then there was the Nisling Mountain Range and countless other ranges, some almost lunar in appearance. They were opaque, light-filled, rugged and desperately beautiful.

With the sun rising around 10am once we had crossed the 60th parallel, there was only six hours or so of daylight. The rest of the time we drove in a brittle, glittering dark.

Sometimes the snow was so thick and the road so treacherous we struggled to top 30 miles an hour.

Then there were days when the temperature held steadfastly below minus 30 degrees. At one petrol station the pump was frozen solid and we took it in turns with the attendant trying to beat it into action.

At other times the dogs squealed like babies when we let them out of the car as the ice bit into their soft southern paws.

We were temporarily unseated one especially chilly morning in the Yukon. With the temperature colder than ever, our (almost) new Dodge Ram truck, the pride of the Detroit automakers, spluttered and died.

One of the valves froze, the oil seals blew and we dribbled a gallon of the black stuff all over the Alaska highway.

Even in our misfortune we were lucky, however. A local dressed in the garb of the north took a look under the bonnet.

"It's your PVT," he muttered. Reaching over he snapped a small plastic tube leading into the engine. "With a bit of oil you should get to Whitehorse now. Then you can replace that bit I just broke."

We made it. Just. We got a new plastic pipe and the local Chrysler service wired some cardboard to the front of the radiator to stop it happening again.

"That should do it," one of the mechanics said. "Don't forget to take it off in May when the temperature reaches zero."

Two days later - eight days after we had left the ranch - we rolled into Anchorage.

That was two weeks ago. Since then life has treated me grandly.

I am no longer Julius the redneck rancher but Professor Strauss, esteemed instructor on the matter of the world's media and the vagaries of reporting in dodgy places.

I have a nice big office with nice big windows, a 15 minute walk to work (often through moose turds) and a total of 15 or 20 students.

It doesn’t hurt, of course, that all but two or three are keen young ladies.

They even pretend to like my boring old stories from small, forgotten conflicts that would see most people nodding off before you could say Velika Kladusa.

Of course, I do hold the sword of grades over their young heads.

Occasionally, like a skilled tennis player placing a ball, I throw a long stare into the middle distance as if caught in a reverie of heroic deeds left unrecounted.

Unforutnately they're a pretty smart bunch - some of them use words in their essays I've never heard of - and I'm sure they'll see through me soon.

All the stories I keep telling take me back to those days, weeks and months sequestered in third-rate accommodation in shady corners of the world fighting for my postage stamp of space on the next day's foreign pages.

Now, at least, I can see that they were not entirely wasted.

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Snow ploughs and Santa Claus

It looked wonderful in the catalogue. Yellow, gleaming, metallic - and all for a very reasonable thousand dollars or so. With funds dwindling but the first snowfall already upon us we decided to bite the bullet.

Perhaps nothing defines a Canadian homesteader quite as well as the means he uses to get rid of his (or her) snow.

There are so many options. The Luddite's method is the shovel. If you don't mind parking your car on the road and walking or snowshoeing in to your property (and a steady flow of ill-disguised pity from your neighbours) this is a tried and trusted approach.

Then there is the snow-blower - a machine that you push through your yard. It chucks the snow in a playful little arc about three feet to the right (or left). For the more lethargic there is even a model that drives itself. All you have to do is walk.

Next up is the ATV-mounted snow plough. Some people, including, unsurprisingly, the local ATV dealer, swear by them. But real country folk consider them a bit small and twee with their measly clearing path and their silly (although admittedly optional) flashing lights.

The only proper option for true wilderness types like us, however, is the truck-mounted snow plough. A huge metal shovel-like appendage, that hangs on the front of your pick-up truck, they come in all shapes and sizes and with a variety of controls.

Up in our valley there is no room for casual dalliance when it comes to snow removal. We are borderline rainforest. In the early spring and late autumn we have rain. And in the winter we have.... snow. Tons and tons of the stuff.

When we first arrived in March there was so much of it piled up in our garden that by the time our neighbour had beaten a path to our front door (with a huge digger) the snow piles were 12 or 18 feet high.

So I took the plunge. A local dealer, a telephone call, a credit card number, it all seemed so civilised and easy. A couple of weeks later a beautiful yellow snow blade arrived complete with mountings for my truck.

Proud is an understatement of what I felt. Sure the loggers and big boys had five and six thousand dollars ploughs but I now had my own "Personal Snowbear" replete with proprietary stickers. Kristin mocked me saying I was walking around like a peacock.

With Ed, the same neighbour who had (literally) beaten a path to our front door in February, we fitted the huge metal blade to the truck. It was harder work than it looked and took a fair bit of fiddling and a cold afternoon.

But when it was ready it looked magnificent. For three days it just sat in the drive and I looked at it. I pointed it out to visitors. I put on my checked lumberjack shirt and imagined myself manouevering it around the yard.

Of course, once the snow plough was ready for action, the snow melted. I suppose that's the way life is. For two weeks it was warm and wet with not enough of the white stuff to dust even our doggies' feet.

In the meantime I came to an arrangement with Sonny, a neighbour and new friend. He had an ancient pick-up he didn’t use and was also looking for a spot of occasional snow removal.

We decided to share - he would provide his truck and I would provide my new snow plough.

The deal saved him having to buy his own plough. For me it meant that I wouldn't have to knock the hell out of my rather elegant but poorly-constructed north American pick-up.

Finally a happy day came. I peered out the window to find the garden shrouded in a pleasing white blanket. I got all ready to go about my business.

There was only one small problem. The contraption wouldn't work. The winch, which controls the blade, had frozen solid.

Great. I'd bought probably the only snow plough in Canada that only works in the summer. I could happily plough thin air from April until September. But as soon as there was a touch of frost in the air, it seemed it would refuse to cooperate.

It was a bit like buying a boat that was particularly good on land but couldn’t handle the water.

After much suffering, I went to the shop where I bought it, a two and a half hour trip away by car. "Not our responsibility," they said. "You'll have to phone the company that makes them."

So I phoned the snow plough company. "We don't make the winch, we buy it in," a lady told me. "You'll have to call the manufacturer."

When I finally reached them and mentioned that perhaps it wasn't sealed properly, that water might have got in and frozen, the man said: "It's not a submarine, you know."

It was enough to set me off. My voice began to crack. I felt expletives rising from my stomach. Then - one of the drawbacks of living in the bush - just as I was ready to launch myself verbally at this unhelpful man, our satellite phone went into one of it's frequent brown-outs.

To cut a long story short, we still have the plough. And the faulty winch. The company reluctantly agreed to look at it but I would have to pay the postage and wait weeks or months while they decided what to do next. Meanwhile the snow would be piling up.

So now, our snow mornings look like this: I surreptitiously make off with Kristin's fanciest hairdryer, and using an extension cable and my back to shield the squalid act from her view, pummel the winch with hot air for about 20 minutes.

Sometimes it deigns to work. Sometimes it doesn't. Another of the many joys of the Canadian wilderness. Next year I think I'll just buy a shovel.

***************

The other big news at the ranch is that this winter, just as its set to get nice and cold, we're heading out. Hawaii? Mexico? Egypt? Sun, sea, sand? Nope. We're off to Alaska.

The university in Anchorage has offered me an academic chair, a fancy word for a teaching position, lecturing students for a semester. I was up there earlier this month for an interview of sorts.

I thought that my lecture, cobbled together bits of war talk, would end in my being exposed as an imposter. Ignomiously booed off the stage. Eggs hurled at me as if I was a Ukrainian presidential candidate.

But no. My new Alaskan friends actually seemed to like it. A couple of the more alert attendees even noticed when I had finished and clapped a little.

If any of you would like to take pleasure in my discomfort the whole episode has been saved for e-posterity as a podcast. (http://kasenna.uaa.alaska.edu/~advancement). So - US work visa permitting - it's Professor Strauss for the next couple of months.

Of course the logistics won’t be easy. The terms of our truck lease prohibit us from taking our fancy new Dodge Ram with the selectable four-wheel drive and huge driving cab, so we're going to fall back on our trusty old VW Golf.

Even that would be fine, if we weren't taking the dogs.

The last time Masha and Karu made a guest appearance on this blog, they were small, cute and (almost) fit in a shoe box. Now they're nine months old, fierce looking things with a strong streak of independence and adolescent misbehaviour.

What's more - true hill-billies that they are - they hate traveling in cars. Masha sometimes pukes. Karu always pukes and sometimes chucks in a bit of diarrhea for good measure. Great stuff when its minus 20 degrees outside and the windows are wound tightly up.

Not to worry. It's only 2,500 miles. I reckon we can probably make it in four and a half days if I put my foot down. Mapquest reckon its 42 hours driving time, roughly London to Budapest and back again. Should be a breeze.

So. That's the news from the ranch. Sonny, our neighbour with whom we share the plough, has agreed to house-and-horse sit for us through the dark months. We plan to be back in mid May just as spring will be arriving. We're opening again to our guests on June 15.

In the meantime we'd like to wish you all a very Happy Christmas and a wonderful 2007. And we hope very much we'll see some of you at the ranch this coming year.

Julius + Kristin

The Kremlin and its critics

For those of you who read our blog for updates on the ranch and a whiff of wilderness escape, my apologies.

The recent shooting of Anna Politkovskaya, a fierce Putin critic in Russia, has left me musing on the future of that great country and a small incident shortly before I left Russia last year.

This week Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB spy who fled Russia and was investigating her death, was killed in London, apparently with a radioactive poison. The Kremlin is the prime suspect. It seems in Russia the clock may slowly be turning back.

This is a tribute, of sorts, to Anna Politkovskaya.



It was an early morning phone call that told me about the attack.

Issa, a friend in Chechnya, his usually steady voice betraying just a tremor of fear, said unknown gunmen had opened fire on the car he had sent to collect me.

Of the two men inside, one was badly wounded. He said that my trip to the mountains south of Grozny would have to be postponed.

Later that day Issa (not his real name) called again to say there were rumours of government involvement in the shooting. "Go back to Moscow," he said. "Go back now. There's something badly wrong here. You're not safe."

Sitting in my hotel in Vladikavkaz, a half hour drive from the scene of the Beslan school siege which had ended so tragically six months before, I was a little rattled but hardly suspicious.

Even in 2005, four years after the Kremlin had declared the pacification of the small mountainous republic complete, drive-by gunfire and random shootings were everyday occurences in Chechnya.

It was only when I returned to Moscow and, with an American colleague, Doug Birch, who had been with me in the Caucasus, was invited to an interview at the Lubyanka, that alarm bells began to ring.

Deep in the corridors of the slab-like building, the nerve centre of Lavrentia Beria's infamous purges of the 1950s and so much other Soviet repression, a senior official sauntered in in a worn grey suit.

"So you are the journalist who was shot up in Chechnya," the FSB man started with a knowing look. "How many times do we have to tell you people not to travel there without our escorts?"

My mind raced. How did the FSB know about the shooting in Chechnya? Were they behind it? Were they capable of shooting western journalists? If they were not involved, then how did they know about the incident?

Casting aside some of the wilder theories that sprang to mind, there was an inescapable conclusion. Either Moscow's secret policemen had been party to the attack or they had found out about it in some other way.

In the event, President Putin's men were wrong. As so often happens, important details were misconstrued. I had not been in Chechnya at the time.

But the Russian regime's message was loud and clear: Don’t try and hide from us, because you can't. Mess with us, and you'll be sorry. Defy us, and you may not live to tell the tale.

For many western journalists based in Moscow, such oblique threats - and the ever-present possibility of expulsion - were cause enough to stay away from Chechnya. Editors in London and New York had, in any case, long wearied of the story.

Some reporters opted for the Kremlin-organised Potemkin visits that showed off rebuilt hospitals and schools. But only the most stubborn persisted in travelling illicitly to the region.

For Anna Politkovskaya, probably Russia's bravest and most critical journalist, such trips were the bread-and-butter of her professional career.

While the majority of Russian reporters slavishly toed the Kremlin line, she travelled repeatedly and extensively in the war-torn republic documenting Moscow's crimes and abuses.

When Putin nominated Akhmed Kadyrov as his proxy, Politkovskaya cast a light on the killings and kidnappings he carried out in the Kremlin's name.

Later Kadyrov was blown apart by a bomb and his thuggish son Ramzan took over the levers of power - and terror - in Chechnya.

Politkovskaya continued to be unflinching in her criticism. Long after international attention had moved on, she frequently travelled to Chechnya to document the banal brutality that stalks the republic.

Such commitment to a story is often thankless in a world where media attention flits giddily from one crisis to the next. For those who stay behind the journalistic rewards inevitably diminish but the risks only increase.

The result of Politkovskaya's work were two seminal books on Chechnya under Putin: The Dirty War and A Small Corner of Hell.

Later she wrote Putin's Russia, a book that was an unremitting attack on the former KGB spy's rule. It won her international plaudits.

But as her voice won an audience abroad, so the danger for Politkovskaya at home grew. Regime officials began to denounce her as a traitor and a nuisance.
Officials hinted that the country would be better off without her.

In the dying years of Soviet Union, the reasoning was that the more a dissident's voice was heard abroad, the safer they were at home. But this calculus fails to hold under the quixotism of today's Kremlin.

The Putin regime, characterised by an arrogance that comes with it's increasing economic clout and an almost total lack of censure from the west for its more egregious actions, is often immune to foreign criticism.

This is the milieu that led to Politovskaya's death.

In 2004 as she made her way to Beslan to try and help negotiate an end to the hostage crisis, she was almost certainly poisoned by the servants of the regime.

Then, this autumn, as she made her way home to her Moscow apartment, she was shot dead, apparently by a professional killer.

The debate over who killed Politkovskaya will continue for some time. Was it the FSB? Was it a faction of the military embarrassed by her investigations into corruption? Was it Ramzan Kadyrov?

We will probably never find out. After a howling silence, Putin made it clear that he did not see Politkovskaya's demise as setback for Russia. On the contrary.

During the last trip I made to the Caucasus before leaving Russia I worked on another story with a local journalist called Fatima, a mother-of-two.

The story was about the killing and torture of innocent civilians by the local FSB and police. We found plenty of evidence.

To punish Fatima for working with foreign reporters, local FSB agents abducted her and burnt cigarettes into her fingers. A key interviewee we talked to later went missing, presumed dead.

Unfortunately, with Putin in the Kremlin, such abuses have become the norm.

Julius Strauss

(My apologies to any of you who may have read a version of this in the Frontline newsletter).

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Chainsaws and Cappuccinos

I stood there facing our latest purchase. A logging truck load of timber. That's maybe 20 chords of wood. A huge amount. Even with our three greedy woodstoves it might last us two or three years.

The logs lay silently, almost solemnly, on a forgotten edge of our property, hard on the mountainside. Now all I had to do was cut them up. Cut them up, split them and transport them to the woodshed.

I stared at our beaten-up and leaking old chainsaw (a well-worn hand-me-down) and thought back a little whistfully to my days as Moscow Bureau Chief for the Daily Telegraph.

Irina, my super-efficient assistant would have known who to call to sort this lot out. Tolya, the office chauffeur, would probably have retained some miscellaneous wood-cutting skills from his Soviet youth.

If we had had to call in the professionals to get the job done, the whole thing would have gone on an expense account. Not that we would have had to do anything so primeval as cut up wood in Moscow.

So, how to use a chainsaw? The first person I asked was Kris, a long-haired and laid-back Belgian neighbour who was passing by on the road that runs through our property. (It's a goat track really but the Canadians call it BC Highway 31.)

His expression told me there was nothing to it. "You just hold it like this," he said striking a relaxed pose, rolled-up cigarette glued to his lower lip, "And then let the saw do the rest."

Mmmmm. It couldn’t surely be that easy. Friends in England had told me that foresters now had to go on special courses before they could use one of these fiercesome machines.

A local shop that sold the saws carried a bewildering array of safety equipment ranging from kevlar tops to safety trousers to steel-tipped boots as well as ear protectors, eye protectors and crotch protectors.

I asked Ed, another neighbour. He looked willing to help but worried.

Eventually it was Jezzer, a newcomer, who came to the rescue. Visiting with two other New Zealander friends, he announced his arrival at the ranch by leaping bareback onto one of our unsuspecting horses.

Cola (named after the ubiquitous drink not the Russian peninsula), his unwilling and unready steed, who had not been ridden for two years, took fright and, gratifyingly, dumped Jezzer on his fidgety arse.

For the next three days Jezzer proved himself a vintage ranchero. He beat in fence posts, slung bails and attacked wasps nests. (That last feat cost him five bites on his already-bruised backside.)

Then he showed me how to use the chainsaw. "Hold it like this. Don't use the tip. Sharpen the blade like this." And so on. And so on. All good useful outback skills.

(Egged on by his wayward mates, Jezzer also felled one of our huge, though admittedly dead, trees while my attention was elsewhere.)

Once some of the sawing was done, the next stage was chopping the stuff up. The neighbours looked at us aghast. "What, you haven't got a log-splitter?" they asked with wide eyes.

Log-splitter was not a word in my vocabulary. I looked it up in an outdoor equipment catalogue. Beautifully-crafted little machines that split wood for you. $2000-$3000 a piece.

We hadn't bargained for that and the remains of our rapidly dinminishing bank balance was already carefully apportioned.

Each tiny slice was spoken for - mortgage payments, insurance payments, bread, sugar, butter, diesel, dog chews.

In the end we decided to splash out on a splitting axe. $25. That wouldn't break the bank. It was fittingly called a Grizzly.

This week Operation Make Firewood finally swung into action. I donned my rather swanky lime-tinted safety goggles, some heavy hiking boots (not steel toe-capped but close enough) and a checked lumberjack shirt.

After numerous trips to the chainsaw service, our trusty Stihl was ready to get at it. A bit of chain oil in this hole, small turn on the screw to get the tension just so.

My assistant was Kadri, an industrious Estonian girlfriend of Kristin's visiting as part of a round-the-world tour. (Hawaii, New York, Meadow Creek and other global spots of note).

When we had sawn the huge logs into slices, off she hauled them to the cutting block. One by one, aching muscle by aching muscle, I split them up like birthday cakes. Each slice had to be just the right size.

After two days, my back is killing me, my arms are rubbery and stiff and my knees are achingly close to collapse.

My once soft and gentle small pink hands - creatures of the keyboard whose most strenuous pre-wilderness exercise had been holding pint glasses - are calloused, dirty and strangely muscled.

It all seems worth it when we look at the long neatly stacked rows of firewood. (The art of wood-stacking was one of many unexpected skills Kristin brought with her from the old country.) More to the point it will keep off the winter chill.

Two or three more days and the lion's share of the firewood operation should be over - at least for this year.

Then all we have to do is learn to plough snow. "It can't be that difficult," I ventured to a neighbour. Apparently it is. All angles and depths and pathway calculations.

In preparation for the task, a huge plough is sitting boxed in our garage complete with baffling installation instructions as to how to mount it on our truck.

With General Winter on the march, it will soon be time to swing into action on that front too.

But first its off to Vancouver for a week. Dig out our fancy towny clothes, sip cappuccinos, watch artsy movies and lounge through those huge, slightly industrial, bookshops.

We may be well on the way to hill-billydom. But we're not quite there yet.

Teutons and Moosery

It was an unexpected start to our first season.

Last month, returning to the ranch one sunny afternoon, Kristin came upon three over-sized red-headed German tourists spread out comfortably in our garden around one of our refurbished picnic tables.

They had unloaded their lunch onto its pristine olive-green surface - I know it was pristine because I painted it only a few weeks ago - and were chomping away happily.

Anyone else might have felt abashed to have been caught in the act of a surreptitious lunch in somebody else's front garden when the owner returns unexpectedly.

Not these hearty souls. "Where are the grizzly bears?" one of them demanded with a less than humble tilt of the nose as he stuffed a tasty morsel into his gullet.

Kristin, as ever, was reasonable. She let the tourists finish their lunch before waving them on their way. I would have been less understanding.

The name Grizzly Bear Ranch seems to be causing all kinds of confusion among this year's crop of Canada-bound Europeans.

"You breed grizzly bears? We would like to see them," said an Austrian couple who showed up with two small kids in a camper van the size of a small housing project.

"Well, no, we don't actually breed them," I tried to explain. "But the name," the man countered. "You are a Grizzly Bear Ranch, no?"

Feeling guilty we invited them in for coffee. For the next hour their offspring jumped on the sofas, slapped the windows, kicked the television and teased the dogs.

I made the mistake of proferring a bit of my schoolboy German and in return was bombarded with a half-hour of Teutonic tongue-twisters. So much for good PR.

Another regular, who never fails to shake up the neighbourhood, is a local RCMP constable who seems to have made it his mission in life to bring law and order to our wayward valley.

He spends much of his time up here hunting down people who ride quads on the road (technically illegal) and checking for unlicenced guns (soon to be legal). As for the acres of pot, which is the mainstay of the local economy, they seem to go largely unremarked.

The last time I met the constable was about two weeks ago in a neighbour's garage.

As he approached, a huge array of gadgety strapped to his uniform, I was standing holding a large butcher's knife, splattered in blood and body parts.

That morning, my neighbour had dispatched a moose that had been badly hurt on the road with a shot to the head. He had summoned me to help skin and butcher the unfortunate animal.

I had never butchered so much as a mouse but I joined in the grisly task. Soon even my hair was full of clumps of flesh and blood as my neighbour, a past master at moosery, took a chainsaw to its spinal column.

Perhaps unwisely, I invited the two teenage sons of a friend who was staying to watch the spectacle. For the elder of the two the sight of the deceased cross-eyed moose proved too much. He went down like the proverbial sack of potatoes.

The kids, as it turned out, were also German.

The poor boy's suffering was compounded that afternoon, when, barely recovered from the morning's ordeal and still a little shaky, he watched his team sink to Italy in the World Cup semi-finals.

As for the Mounties' finest, my knife-wielding, blood-splattered aspect did little to worry them.

Anywhere else this may have elicited suspicion but up here in redneckland, it barely raised an eyebrow.

The constable, in any case, is, by his own admission, after bigger fish.

He once confided that he was hell-bent on finding a mysterious black helicopter that apparently flies around our lonely valley at night.

"Had I seen it?" he asked. "No," I replied, ignoring the temptation to ennumerate the logistical difficulties of spotting anything black at night.

"Had I heard about it?" "No."

"Did I know anything about helicopters? Have a helicopter? Helicopters ever visit?" "No, No, No."

Three or four weeks later, a helicopter did indeed visit. As is the custom up here in the mountains, one of the local pilots, who does logging runs and the like, was dropping by to introduce himself.

As the chopper lowered its lozenge-shaped body over our ranch, the horses began to gallop in panic. Inch by careful inch it descended over our large field.

It was at that very moment that the constable decided to pay a return visit. Just as the chopper touched down he came floating down our drive in a late-model police pick-up. (Even the cops drive pick-ups up here.)

The smile on the face of the helicopter pilot turned to a slight frown as the saw the squad car glide to a halt and the constable emerge with a face like thunder.

"I'll be on my way," he muttered.

Needless to say the officer was not interested in my breezy explanations as to what the pilot was up to. He clearly saw conspiracy writ large.

Next month we have a booking from three Californian couples who are each planning on arriving in their own helicopter. Not exactly western Canada on a shoestring.

"What are your GPS co-ordinates?" one of them asked, which had us scrambling to Google Earth.

(For the record they are 50*24'34" North, 117*06'50" West.)

I only hope that the constable doesn't chose August 1 to make his next visit to our innocent, little valley.

I'm sure that no amount of explaining would convince him that a show of such blatant aeronautical prowess could be occasioned by anything as innocent as a summer holiday.

end

Shotguns and Stallions

I really never thought it would come to this.

It all began back in the distant snowbound days of March when one of our closest neighbours - wearing what look like a goat-skin - turned up on our doorstep.

"Dick shot my horse," he declared by way of introduction.

After some plodding around the subject it turned out that the former owner of Grizzly Bear Ranch, a rough and rogueish character by the name of Richard, had blown away our visitor's prize stallion.

The stud's crime - and in these mostly redneck parts it's still seen that way - was to break through the paddock fencing, chase Richard's rather fetching young mares around and then try and roger one of them.

Of course I wasn't here at the time, but I fancy it was round the back, near the naïve etching of a cowboy sitting on his faithful mount and little hut marked "Livery".

Anyway, Richard put a swift end to the loved-up stallion's intentions with his high-powered rifle.

According to one neighbour he then dragged the horse into the forest, poured diesel over it and set it on fire. "It didn't burn too well," he said.

Another version has it that the horse was buried under another neighbour's chicken shed.

When I first heard this story, I thought to myself: "What a cowboy! I would never do a thing like that."

Fast-forward three months. A beautiful early summer evening. In one hand I'm struggling to wrap a towel around me as I leap Tarzan-like from my evening shower.

With the other I'm already reaching for our twelve-bore, armed not with puny bird pellets but huge great grizzly-stopping slugs. (I fired it once in the spring and it kicks like a mustang.)

Half-naked and hollering with rage I charge from the house to where Kristin has been holding the fort, trying to scare off an equine intruder with a lowly garden rake.

Before I could make the life-or-death decision - and with a flash of brilliant white and a nonchalant toss of his head - the stallion was gone.

The horse was none other than the son of the luckless lady-killer. His visit was the second in two days. The first had come at five o'clock the previous morning.

For a half hour or so we had heard our two geldings whinnying but assumed it was just a continuation of a fight between them for supremacy that had begun the previous evening.

Henry, our grey and a cantankerous old quarter horse had been trying to bully Cola, the elegant and better-bred newcomer, but had met determined resistance.

After getting to bed at 2am (an English friend had managed to get lost on the way to the ranch and I'd been out on a midnight sortie to try and find him) I wasn't in a fine mood as the first light of dawn slipped over the Rocky mountains.

The invading stallion had broken through the paddock, torn up tracts of our garden and bitten Henry badly on the neck. Cola had suffered a nasty scratch in the melee.

Henry and Cola were still quivering with fear. I suspect it was the thought of being ignomiously, and perhaps mistakenly, ravaged by the valley's alpha-male that put the fear of God in them.

Determined to go through the formalities, I searched for O'Shea, the owner of the itinerant stallion and three other sorry-looking white horses that survive on subsistence grazing.

But he had apparently moved out of the old truck box he had been living in with his new family. So, anxious to play the responsible citizen, I paid a visit to the local branch of the RCMP an hour to the south.

The mountie on duty was from the city and filling in for the day. He seemed bemused by rural tales of rampaging stallions and equine executions and doubtfully suggested I launch a civil lawsuit.

"And by the way," he said as I turned to leave. "If you don't have your seatbelt on next time you drive up to a police station, you'll get a ticket." Not exactly my idea of always getting your man.

So I'm afraid it's going to have be the law of the gun. The code of the settlers. No stallion is going to mess with my horses or chase my woman around our yard.

Barely a season into our new existence, it seems, I'm already becoming a redneck. "Don’t shoot the horse," a wise neighbour told me recently. "I shot a dog once years ago and I still feel bad about it."

But then - he's probably a better man than I.

Julius

www.grizzlybearranch.ca

Between the Rockies and a hard place

(My apologies to those of you who may have seen a version of this in this month’s Frontline newsletter.)

It had been a truly awful week.

As I was driving through northern Bosnia on a routine assignment several days before the voice of my brother came through on a crackly satellite phone.

He told me how RUF rebels had overrun the camps he was working at in the Sierra Leone jungle and he was surrounded, under fire, and running out of food and water.

As the days passed his predicament worsened. Determined to do what little I could I persuaded the Telegraph to let me go to Freetown to cover the civil war.

Then, on the eve of my flight into Lungi airport on a Royal Air Force transport plane, Kurt Schork, a man I liked and deeply respected, was shot and killed in an RUF ambush.

Three days later and a drugged-out child soldier was jabbing his Kalashnikov deep into my ribs to encourage me to interview his illiterate and semi-comatose commander.

But the commander was simply incapable of speech. This seemed to infuriate the young soldier who only jabbed harder. Safety off, finger on trigger.

It was a day or two later and I was far from the line of fire chatting with British soldiers when something hit me like a policeman’s riot stick.

My legs went soft and my vision blurred. I felt panic rising like a wave. I felt so sick I thought I was going to collapse.

The army medics checked me over but found nothing wrong. Later, back in the UK, several specialists were mystified. One suggested doubtfully that brain surgery might help.

For months I was off work, couldn’t drive a car, couldn’t even walk down the road without fear of being overcome by a fresh, debilitating attack.

As the weeks went by it slowly dawned on me this was not a tropical disease or a genetic brain disorder but stress, shell-shock, war fatigue, call-it-what-you-will.

Eventually, as a desperate measure, I flew to Canada, bought an ancient camper van and, as my frazzled nerves began to slowly recover, trundled north across the prairies to the frozen Northwest Territories.

Until then I had considered myself lucky in war.

In the beginning it had almost seemed like fun in a macabre sort of way. I remember the thrill of my maiden solo drive down Sarajevo’s Sniper Alley in a souped-up car with the Sex Pistols blaring and the sun roof open.

Later, after my first dead body, first near miss and first guilt-ridden sleepless night the flamboyance cooled and a bitter anger and sense of injustice took its place.

I witnessed bits of the Serbo-Croat war, Bosnia and then, later, covered the massacres of Kosovo, the air war, Nato’s deployment.

After Canada I eventually returned to the front line. There was the tiny conflict in Macedonia and then, after 9/11, months of Afghanistan and Iraq.

I loved Afghanistan and the Caucasus, and even enjoyed the early months in Iraq in a twisted sort of way, but there was a nagging and growing sense that it was time to move on.

The rules were changing, the buccaneering days when embedded was a dirty word were over and covering the war in Iraq had become a grinding and thankless business.

A year on, as I write this, I’m in the Canadian Rockies. Outside my window the snow is still on the ground and the river that runs along the edge of my 32 acres of wilderness is inching higher.

A couple of weeks ago I waded it with my brother after a long walk through the forest – it seemed to take forever and our legs almost froze as we held the shotgun loaded with huge slugs and our two-way radios clear of the rushing water.

In two or three weeks I’m going to open here for commercial guests. The plan is to try and lay on some of the things I always wanted to do in my life but never got around to.

I’ve already found a great local guy who will arrange fly-fishing tours on the streams and lakes here. Can’t get much better therapy than that.

For my part, I’m going to lead trips way up into the Selkirk mountains. Some will certainly be on quad-bikes – I have bought five of these rugged little machines - others, perhaps, on foot.

In the autumn we’ll get out our new Zodiac and ride the river to watch the grizzlies that come and feed on the salmon and Rainbow trout.

Of course, I’m still drawn to wars. In the off-season I may well hit the road again if I can drum up a freelance commission or two.

Kristin, my girlfriend who has made all this possible, has said she’s happy to stay behind and look after the dogs and horses.

As for the great friends I made in the field, I miss them. I’d like them to feel they can come here at any time for a piece of the serenity and beauty and to feel the awesome power of these mountains.

To try and give a little back – and perhaps help out those who, just as I did, may need a temporary refuge – we’re setting up a very small fund and we’ll ask for donations from paying guests.

Each year in the off-season we’ll offer up a cabin for a month (the fund will pay the air fare) for a strung-out journalist who needs a break.

It won’t be a holiday so much as a place to unwind and recharge. Anthony Loyd will run the UK side, I’ll do my bit from here. If there’s anything left over each year we will donate it to the Kurt Schork Memorial Fund.

Three years ago this spring I was sitting in a Kurdish town long after dusk, my back to a scarred wall, watching as Iraqi tank shells sailed overhead and crashed into houses a few streets away.

I had been drinking and cheered quietly as each one landed.

I have traded in those battlefield thrills, the booze-soaked evenings with colleagues, the fitful sleep and the technicolour dreams for the more elemental challenges of the wilderness.

I’m not saying that I will never again drink from the intoxicating brew that is war journalism. But for now its grizzly bears and fast-flowing mountain rivers. And I’ve never felt better.

Avalanches and Amateurs

It had to happen – it was all going far too smoothly.

There we were smugly driving home through the Rocky mountains last night congratulating each other on the choice we had made with our lives and waffling on about the beauty of our new surroundings.

We got to Revelstoke on the Trans Canada turned south and speeding through the last light of the day made the ferry that takes us across Arrow Lake. The crossing was beautiful, as ever.

The road along Trout Lake was muddy and snowy but passable and we were about half an hour from home when… suddenly… an avalanche.

I’ve seen these things before on television – huge great roaring things that bury people and cars and villages. This one, by contrast, was small, even pathetic. More of a little slide than a proper avalanche. Wet snow and mud.

But, by evil chance, it had fallen on one of the stretches of the road (Highway 31 is it’s official and inappropriate title) where it narrows to little more than a dirt track than clings to the rocks.

On the left snow and rocks going up as far as the eye could see. On the right a sheer drop of several hundred feet into the frigid depths of Trout Lake.

It was dark, there was no traffic and, like the neophytes that we are we had forgotten to bring a spade, an axe and even a torch. All we had were the fruits of our mega-shop from Ikea in Calgary.

To begin with I sat there a little dazed. Turning the pick-up around was no easy proposition and, in any case going round the other way meant a four or five hour detour on pretty terrible roads.

Trying to impress I leapt from the car manfully and swore at the snowy obstacle blocking our way. I peaked over the edge and that made my legs wobble.

“Don’t worry,” Kristin said. “We’ll use the Ikea rubbish bins to scoop the snow away.”

So there it was – for the next 20 minutes we hacked away at the snow and mud with the latest incarnations of Ikea’s recyclable garbage modules.

Every few seconds we glanced nervously upwards to see if the mountain was going to try and dump another load.

Eventually we carved out a small channel for the left wheels of the truck. We calculated the right wheel would have six inches or so to spare.

Kristin got out and, inch by stupefying inch, hand-guided me across the slippery mess. I kept the driver’s door open and silently prayed to the God of the Mountains and the shamans and the Druids that the truck wouldn’t slip off its precarious perch.

We made it. Kristin: calm, Scandinavian and matter-of-fact. Me: sweaty and giggly. Our first avalanche.

Anyway – the good news at the ranch is that Jim Bailey, a veteran fly-fisherman, our west Kootenay neighbour and a really nice guy has agreed to arrange our fly-fishing tours. We sealed the deal over lunch last week in Nelson.

Meanwhile this morning the sun is shining and the river is bubbling. And the huge snow columns that frame our driveway like ancient Gods of winter are only half the size they were a week ago.

www.GrizzlyBearRanch.ca

From war zones to the wilderness

It was an intimidating sight. A wall of snow on both sides with one tiny path down the middle – part ice, part mud. We squeezed our new pick-up truck with it’s trailer and the little Golf diesel Kristin was driving through the gap and inched our way towards the front door.

This was our new home. Grizzly Bear Ranch. 32 acres of unspoilt wilderness in the British Columbia Rockies. It had cost us everything we had and a lot more and we hoped it would be our home for years, even decades to come.

The whole adventure had begun two years before when, as Moscow correspondent for Britain’s Daily Telegraph, I had been sent to the Estonian capital Tallinn to write a story about how Brits were taking over the quaint little town, drinking too much and behaving badly.

I arrived, met Kristin, who was working as the local correspondent for Reuters, drank too much and behaved badly. She did too. Five months later, after long weekends together and short, stolen holidays in different European capitals, she moved to Moscow to be with me.

Typically, and to my shame, I wasn’t there when she arrived. Revolutionary fever – of a kind – had broken out in Ukraine and I was stuck with the orange marchers on Maidan, the miserably cold square in the middle of Kiev.

That winter Kristin and I lived quietly, taking long walks through the beautiful Moscow district we lived in and hung out with friends in our local bar – a terrible place with 1980s Soviet pop and almost naked girls dancing on the bar called Rok Vegas (without the “c”.)

When spring came we decided to move to Canada. For more than a decade I had been covering wars for the Daily Telegraph – first Bosnia, then Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq. It had become a tiring, numbing business.

Although I still got a sense of satisfaction from bribing Russian soldiers to get me into Chechnya, drinking tea with Afghan warlords or surviving a brutal day in Iraq, my heart yearned for something wilder, more natural and more elemental.

I took a job with the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, covering the Canadian prairies and the dozens of northern Indian reserves where people still live in Third World conditions.

My hope was to be able to fly around central Canada in my own little plane (I’d got a commercial pilot’s license several years earlier) and write stories about how people lived. The paper, naturally, wanted more news, less travel and fewer expenses.

It would be easy to say that growing bored at the Globe propelled us into the wilderness. But things were not that chronologically neat. We actually saw Grizzly Bear Ranch for the first time while driving through British Columbia last summer.

It was coincidence really. I’d seen the ranch advertised on the internet while we were still in Russia and we’d dropped in on a whim. Richard and Joanne, who had run the ranch for a decade, were getting on and had decided to move away.

It really did seem to us the most beautiful place on earth that day. The sun was shining, the grass was green and the sound of the river bubbling along its stony course permeated our thoughts and still colours our memories of that day.

Anyway – so here we are. I can hear the river bubbling as I write these words which will go out into the ether on our new - far from perfect - satellite internet feed.

Our grand plan is to run the ranch as a destination for travelers and visitors who are looking for something a little different. The beauty. The seclusion. The incredible wildlife.

We want it to be a refuge for friends too – especially, but not only, for those colleagues who have spent years in war zones. A place where they can come to unwind, write, lay some of their demons to rest or just enjoy the serenity.

We’ve starting out by offering fishing tours (that will be guided by a veteran local fly-fisherman) and ATV quad tours which I will lead and which will take visitors up into the stunning Selkirk mountains.

At first we were a little reluctant to buy these noisy little machines but we were soon won over. They also simply so clever and versatile and get you to places you could only otherwise reach on foot. And it takes a couple of hours instead of several days.

We also want to show people the best of the wildlife. To do that we’ve bought a Zodiac inflatable boat we’re going to try and use on the river and for lake trips. And, of course, we’ll also use our four-wheel-drive truck.

As for Kristin, she's already settling into her new kitchen. She's got lots of gleaming new equipment, books crammed with ideas and recipes and, though she denies it, I know she can barely wait for the first full house.

So – if you’re still reading this – come and visit us in Grizzly Bear Ranch. It really is one of my beautiful spots I’ve ever been to and I’ve seen many wonderful places in my years on the road. Friends, visitors, friends-of-friends, travellers - you’re all welcome!